What happens when one size fits all becomes one size fits none? If you’re trying on a pair of stretch pants, it’s an awkward sartorial moment. When you’re talking about the education of our children, however, it’s a disaster of a higher order. But that’s the very question we all should ask our public education system.

In the business world, there is a manufacturing concept known as mass customization. It sounds oxymoronic, but companies such as Dell Computer take it to heart and have built great businesses on it. Simply, Dell takes a commodity product — the personal computer — and personalizes it according to the buyer’s needs. Want to upgrade the RAM? No problem. A different video card? Easy. The result is a PC simultaneously standard (that is, it’s assembled like every other PC) and customized (it reflects your needs and interests).

Unfortunately, that is not the case with our public schools. Our formalized public education system is a state-sponsored project by which, in concept, students become mature members of their communities through a thirteen-year program that helps them develop knowledge, skills, and character. To do this with millions of kids at the same time requires some sort of standardization — that’s understood. To free the process of all such guidelines would be an invitation to chaos.

         

For many of us, the gateway drug toward a lifetime of experimentation with world-saving endeavors was food. With so many points of personal relevance — from health concerns to the pleasures of taste to the simple fact of its frequent necessity — food can be an opportunity to see the immediate positive effects of changed behavior.

In many ways, advocates of sustainable food can already boast many achievements: Mainstream grocery stores and big box supermarkets sell organic foods and many of them are sourced from local producers; television networks and celebrity chefs frequently reinforce the idea that farmer’s markets are a great place to shop and fresh foods taste best; and many home gardeners are selecting edible rather than decorative plants.

That said, we still face many challenges in our efforts to create a more sustainable food system and promote good health. One of the most significant obstacles is access. If you laid a city map showing low-income neighborhoods over one illustrating the distribution of grocery stores and markets offering fresh produce and unprocessed foods, the intersections would be disappointingly few.

         

I started a blog a couple of years ago in honor of “Flight School,” the name of my annual conference for entrepreneurs in air and space. Last June, we canceled this year’s event; we were getting a foretaste of the current rotten economy — Eclipse’s troubles, DayJet suspending operations, a general malaise — and didn’t think we could get enough attendees to put on a good show. I’m still hoping to revive the conference — but probably not until 2010.

In the meantime, however, I’m embarking on another kind of Flight School, and trying to play it cool as I mention casually that I’m about to start training as a backup cosmonaut for Charles Simonyi, who will be making his second trip into space this coming March 25. If for some reason he doesn’t go (and I can scrounge up some extra cash), I get to go instead!

         

It’s time to vote.

Yes — in the elections in November — but not only that. I’m talking about the voting you do every day.

Every time you drop a dollar, yen, mark, yuan, frank, rial or pound on the shop counter or wire it through cyberspace, you’re voting. Every purchase you make — or don’t make — large or small, meaningful or trivial, thoughtful or thoughtless, sets in motion a chain of events, and a flow of resources embodied in everything you buy, that has inescapable effects on the world we live in — and the choices that remain available to you, or that close off to you. Every time you do your duty as a “consumer,” (remember “if we don’t the terrorists will have won”?), you cast a vote for a future. You’re designing the world you and your children will live in.

         

In his marvelous book “Better,” Atul Gawande tells the tale of obstetric forceps. Invented in the 17th century to help stuck babies get unstuck during labor, they promised to be a valuable addition to the medical toolkit — so valuable, in fact, that they were kept secret within a single family of doctors for over 100 years. In that time, thousands if not millions of mothers and newborns died unnecessarily.

Sharing workable solutions and adopting them can improve and even save lives. So how might we make it easier to hear about solutions?

One way is by simply telling more stories about what works, like the folks at Changemakers.net do with their motto of “open sourcing social solutions.” When we implement a creative fix at work or in our community, can we share the story of how and why? When writers and producers look for new story topics, can real-world problem-solvers be the stars?

         

The young folks entering kindergarten these past few weeks are a fascinating group. Born at the dawn of the twenty-first century, they will retire — if they retire at all — in 2073. Many could live into the twenty-second century. It’s hard to imagine what the world will be like in 2013, let alone 2073 or beyond. No doubt their journey will be unlike anything we’ve ever dreamed about, filled with inventions and possibilities beyond our most creative fantasies.

I was reminded of this a few days before the school year ended this past June, when my nine-year-old son came to me in a funk. Earlier that day, his teacher had been free thinking with some other students and asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. One kid said he wanted to be an architect; another, a pilot. My son, however, said he didn’t know. He felt bewildered, even a little nervous.

         

If you want to save the world, you have only so much money, time and attention. So the question is - what effort should you throw yourself into that provides the biggest bang for the buck? The Copenhagen Consensus is controversial because these thinkers assess, for example, cutting the emission of greenhouse gases to be a high-cost effort with questionable impact. They point instead to relatively low-cost, high-impact plans like educating women and making sure every child on the planet has enough vitamins and minerals. Their latest list of what to do is fascinating not least because so much of it involves bottom-up, innovative group behavior. In a networked age, that probably has greater odds of success than waiting around for some top-down government to act.

         

When the world seems to be falling down all around us, can we afford to spend our time thinking about the future?

In the midst of ongoing wars, accelerating economic collapse, and cascading environmental ruin, it’s easy to dismiss futurism as self-indulgence, a superficial pastime devoted to spotting the next hot gizmo or telling us all how some coming development changes everything. What really matters is the here-and-now. Serious people know that thinking about the future is frivolous; anyone (or any business) not focusing laser-like on the problems of today is wasting time and money. Right?

Wrong.

         

I spent Wednesday and Thursday of last week at Zeitgeist, the annual meeting that Google hosts for its partners and a few invited guests. On Wednesday afternoon, during the “Serious Sustainability” session, the award-winning author and journalism professor Michael Pollan talked about the American food system, whose dysfunction he has deftly exposed to the public in several of his books.

In addition to its common-sensibility, Pollan’s talk was an poignant example of why it is so difficult to effect the kinds of changes that might actually do what this blog suggests; that is, to save the world.

Framing the talk as an open letter to the incumbent U.S. president, Pollan detailed a persuasive argument showing how industrial agriculture is now hurting us — in terms of energy consumption, food costs, climate change and health concerns — more than it’s helping.

         

One of my proudest moments as an environmentalist came when the Santa Monica Main Public Library answered my plea to install more bike racks. The racks were hard won: I photo-documented then blogged about the over-crowded racks at the LEED-certified building, wrote to the Library board members, then got fellow resident bicyclers to do the same. It all took a while, but in the end we got new racks and were able to park our bikes with ease — until gas prices shot up and the bicycling population doubled, filling up the new bike racks…

No, one bike rack won’t save the world. Some of you may in fact smirk at my celebration of this puny success. Even in California alone, we’ve got way bigger environmental problems: Water’s running out, wildfires keep flaring up, and pinot noir prices are about to go through the roof! Isn’t it time to stop merrily two-wheeling down the beach bike path and start grimly lobbying for the best cap-and-trade program?