Can I Copy Your Homework -- and Represent You in Court?

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Skeptics have been worried that the Microsociety's heavy emphasis on grownup concerns like money, taxes and employment might shunt children onto a fast track to adulthood. Teachers rebut such claims by pointing out that the program taps one of childhood's most salient pleasures, the impulse to play, and harnesses it in the service of absorbing knowledge. "Think about what we usually tell kids when they come into school," says Fred Hernandez, principal at Yonkers. " 'Sit down. Shut up. Get in line.' That's counterproductive, because kids love to play. What Micro does is get them to role-play life."

Still, the question remains: If children are invited to run banks and businesses, won't this turn them into pint-size plutocrats, long on avarice and short on scruples? The irony is that for all the emphasis on economics, the Microsociety schools seem to serve best as living experiments in applied moral development. Consider the check-kiting caper that broke at Lowell after one boy outbid dozens of his students at a Christmas auction and bought up a sackful of toys by writing bad checks. His outraged peers took the boy to court, where the district attorney convicted him but was unable to recover any of the items (everything had been given away as presents to a string of girlfriends). As punishment, the school court decided to confiscate the student's paychecks and ordered him to perform community service for the remainder of the year.

The success of the program of the world, have expressed interest. Japanese educators have toured Lowell, and principal funding for planning behind the Manhattan Micro school comes from Tokyo's Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, which donated $100,000.

While it may be exciting to contemplate what this could hold for the rest of the world, Micro seems to offer the most at home: a chance to customize schools to reflect American culture -- flexible, grass-heterogeneous, self- designed. Such an approach would go a long way toward making U.S. public schools a cradle of national renewal. Microsociety schools won't do this all by themselves, of course, but they have demonstrated the potential to accelerate learning, provide ladders of economic opportunity and give children a sense of how their society works. And for a nation whose dreams seem increasingly beyond the reach of its young, that seems a prospect worth cultivating.