Harold Gray created Little Orphan Annie and another cartoon character named Maw Green. Maw Green was an Irish washerwoman and homespun philosopher who taught the American public many lessons about life. In one series, he has a slobbering, unkempt, aggressive bum confront Maw Green, shouting: "I got rights, ain't I? I'm as good as any of these big shots! Nobody's better'n me! I say all people are born equal! Ain't that right, Maw?" Maw Green agrees that people are born equal, but she turns aside to confide to the reader, "But thank heaven lots of folks outgrow it!"

This business of "outgrowing" equality has traditionally been assigned to education. A number of years ago I launched a career in higher education determined to reform the world by helping all comers "outgrow" the mediocrity of our day. If politics becomes self-serving, we will produce more political scientists. If juvenile delinquency runs rampant, we will produce more sociologists. If business and commerce falter, we will just produce more MBAs. All problems, all social difficulties, all economic issues can be corrected if only we produce more liberal arts graduates.

Although I am still totally committed to education, I have, at long last, come to realize that education alone is not enough. There are obstacles other than education blocking our path to an ideal society, obstacles not easily overcome by merely providing larger and larger schools, more and more books, and more and more of all the other trappings of education.

Perhaps the most educated people of antiquity were the Greeks, yet they destroyed themselves. The Germans have been among the most literate and most completely educated people of modern times, yet they succumbed to the siren song of Adolf Hitler. Twenty-first century America is a society in which "no child is to be left behind," or so goes the public school slogan, eagerly proclaimed by governors and superintendents of schools. Yet, today our schools are populated by more socially dangerous conditions than in the less educated days of former times. And in Guilford County, teachers and administrators have been charged with cheating on end of course exams and as many as 10 high schools may be guilty of ignoring attendance requirements to permit athletes to play games.

History is filled with the records of dead and dying civilizations - civilizations that in most cases achieved the greatest bloom of prosperity and self-satisfaction at the exact time when they lost their way and departed from the very values that gave them direction.

And so we look about us today and see a nation poised for war; towers go down and terrorism alert goes up; our stock market is likely to drop to 6500; retired professionals are going back to work; economic developers are left to talk about cluster studies and changing corporate cultures. Businesses are laying off their employees in record numbers, and too many politicians appear to be cursed with cul-de-sac mentality.

Seems rather ominous, wouldn't you say? It was once thought that such woes of this world were unavoidable. They were ordained by God, by nature or by that wonderful catchall - fate. So the dear double-predestinarian Presbyterian minister who fell heavily down the stairs of the church, seriously cutting his knees and scalp, could stand up, brush himself off and declare, "I am sure glad to have that behind me."

More recently people have come to feel we have a great deal to do with all that happens to us. Today we tend to believe that if we ourselves are not infinite in our abilities, then at least our institutions and organizations can accomplish just about anything.

If the problems of society are the problems of people, then the solutions are also people. School systems, colleges and Chambers of Commerce are ineffective when the people in them become ineffective. They awaken when the people in them awaken. School systems, colleges and Chambers of Commerce are subject to the same deadening forces that affect all other human institutions - a blind attachment to time-honored ways; an uncritical reverence for established procedures; a chronic preoccupation with one's own best interest; a cavalier, noncritical approach to being a board member of a nonprofit organization; and a terribly provincial definition of what is important.

The greatest challenge to me in education and to all of us in all sorts of community organizations is to discover what it is that keeps alive in some people the natural spark of curiosity, eagerness for a challenge, hunger for life and experience, and how we can rekindle that spark when it flickers out. If we solve that problem we will be at the threshold of a new age in community development and indeed in human experience.

One way of doing this may be to design new means for people to render service to the community and to the nation. When President Kennedy posed his famous challenge about doing what you can for the country, the response was great, but people did not know quite what to do about it and he did not live long enough to tell us. We are still trying to figure it out.

Each generation in America has its great work to perform. In the 17th century the purpose was founding the nation; in the 18th century it was conquering the wilderness; in the 19th century the purpose was to settle the land; in the 20th century the purpose was to refine society and make our communities user-friendly. We come now to the great work of the 21st century. I believe the primary purpose of this century is to make this highly technical, highly mobile, highly suspicious society of ours fully functional and effective once again.

I am talking now about the job for colleges and universities across the nation, as well as the work of Chambers across our land. Chambers of Commerce, and I emphatically include the volunteers who multiply staff effectiveness without adding to the payroll, have the tradition and thus the opportunity to lead struggling communities into the new society. Failures of Chambers to do that can have devastating effects on that local society.

To illustrate that, I need only look at our Greensboro Chamber of Commerce to see how a Chamber can stumble and lose the confidence of the community. When we realized what was happening we knew it was time to get our cows back over their buckets. With open honesty and an enthusiastic positive approach, the Chamber restored community confidence along with the objective indices of success. Carl Sandberg was right, "A tree is best measured when it is down," and believe me we were down and the media and critics were taking full measure of how far down we had gone.

Three years ago our Chamber was deeply in debt both in the audit and in public confidence and support. The organization made up of business leaders and claiming to be "the voice of business" was itself doing business in a bad way. But when the volunteers became aware of the problem and the new Chamber executive arrived bringing experience and energy to the task, the books immediately showed a significant positive cash flow, the membership rolls reached new heights and the audited numbers proved that in just two years the Chamber was back as the respected voice of business in our community.

Volunteerism is the key to that. And volunteers in the Chamber have the best chance to truly stir up the community and cut down the sniping and bickering of those who are proud members of CAAA (Citizens Against Almost Anything). You may have a chapter in your community. Their motto is, "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism." We had a very active chapter in Greensboro.

But thanks largely to the leadership of our Chamber President, David Jameson, and a Chamber Board now highly motivated and sensitized, our local CAAA is losing members and the Chamber of Commerce is flourishing. Some days you are the pigeon; some days you are the statue.

Maw Greene, you were right. We can outgrow the equality with which we were born.