My children enjoy a video called Richard Scarry's Best Busy People Video Ever which shows the 1950s-like small-town world of BusyTown, U.S.A. in which the school teacher explains various professions to her class: baker, fireman, travel agent, truck driver, pilot, doctor, etc. At the end, she sings the children a song, "You can be anything you want to be, just look around and you will see, it's a busy world and there's lots to do and this busy world needs me and you". Then the children sing, "We can be anything we want to be..." My children love the song and sing it all day.

Now, as a semi-cynical intellectual, it should be my job to make fun of that: Obviously not every child can be what he or she wants to be. There are societal and personal hurdles which cannot always be overcome. That is statistically obvious. (The classic example is the number of ghetto youth who think they are going to be professional athletes.) This entertainment video is, one could argue, simply one way in which the capitalist system creates workers who at best work harder for the system and at worst blame themselves for their failings instead of seeking systemic redress for their grievances.

But somehow, I like the song, I like the video, I like the message. It seems to me that it is better to tell the children that they are empowered, that they have great influence on their lives - even if they end up more optimistic than they statistically "should" be. The success rate will be higher and the statistics will bend in our favor. The message is at least true enough to sing about.

This morning the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper carried an article by Alex Ruehle called "Youth Without a Dream" (Jugend ohne Traum). It was one of those many articles to come out in recent years about the malaise in the failing German school system, especially in the Hauptschule, the lowest level of the three-tiered system where the mostly-foreign-born children bound for the lower class jobs or unemployment are sent after fourth grade. The article mentioned that the class he visited had taken a computer-run test offered by the federal German employment office ("Arbeitsagentur"). The test taker enters a dream job and then fills in various information about skills and interests. Then the machine tells you your chances. 16 of the 21 children in this particular class - who had not entered "astronaut" and "movie star" but things like "shift leader at Daimler-Chrysler" - were told by the program that they have no chance in their career of choice.

How dumb is that?

That is absolutely outrageous. I can think of no better way to foster docility, helplessness, frustration, anger, crime, or at best emmigration of talent abroad than telling children (these were 16-year-olds) that they have no hope of realizing their ambitions. If there is to be a computer program that makes prognoses like that, it should at the very least offer a path: "If you want to become a Lufthansa mechanic, you will need the following training..."

At the recent Arab-American Dialogue part of what bothered me about the recitations of American responsibility for global bad news is how un-empowering it must seem for all those people everywhere, in the Middle East and Latin America especially, if they really believe the United States are responsible for their problems. Even to the extent that America is to blame, I would think the more they believe it, the more helpless they would feel and the more docile, or angry, they would become.