Sometimes it seems like the problems of today are new – as though society once flourished and only recently fell into decay. If only we could go back, we cry, we’d be certain to regain paradise.

But just how far back would we have to go? Our grand parents? Our great-grandparents? Further?

A great post from xkcd bemoaning “the pace of modern life,” begins with this quote:

The art of letter-writing is fast dying out…We think we are too busy for such old-fashioned correspondence. We fire off a multitude of rapid and short notes, instead of sitting down to have a good talk over a real sheet of paper.

The Sunday Magazine
1871

Of course, a quote like this perhaps only reveals the dissonance between “modern” and “modernity.” Spoken casually, “modern” feels like an ever shortening window of current time – not even my floppy disks can claim to be modern any more.

“Modernity,” on the other hand, has been going on for some time. It’s more modern in a geologic sense.

And it’s somehow reassuring to read someone like John Dewey – so often seen as a bright-eyed optimist – write in 1927:

At election time, appeal to some time-worn slogan may galvanize [a voter] into a temporary notion that he has convictions on an important subjects…

The problems of today aren’t just the problems of today. They are challenges of modernity, and they didn’t spring up over night.

The public may indeed be in “eclipse,” as Dewey bemoaned, but we can still continue to search for the Great Community.

Inspired by the release of the latest edition of Dungeons and Dragons, the New York Times recently published an article by Somerville resident Ethan Gilsdorf on how role playing has influenced a generation of writers.

While the article manages to quote two women – I assume they have a quota – the analysis does seem to leave something out. Consider Gilsdorf’s list of impressive people who were inspired by gaming:

China Miéville (“The City & the City”); Brent Hartinger (“Geography Club”); Cory Doctorow;  Sherman Alexie;  Stephen Colbert; George R. R. Martin (“A Song of Ice and Fire”); Robin Williams, Matt Groening (“The Simpsons”); Dan Harmon (“Community”) and Chris Weitz (“American Pie”).

Oh, that’s right. They’re all dudes.

That annoys me enough to put aside for the moment that the article argues it’s okay to be a nerdy freak when you’re younger because you might still grow up to be a productive member of society. (Everyone but George R. R. Martin is identified as a “former” gamer, apparently having grown out of the scandalous habit.)

I’m not really surprised no impressive women are listed as having been influenced by gaming. After all, we all know that the female gamer is a myth – like unicorns, griffins, or honest politicians.

But really…are there female gamers? Well, yes, the population is definitely greater than zero, but beyond that it’s shockingly difficult to answer with any accuracy.

Since the video game industry rakes in $15 billion annually, they have the most reliable data when it comes to consumer analysis. A 2013 study from the Entertainment Software Association found the population of video/online gamers is close to equal by gender, 55% men and 45% women.

Unfortunately, numbers for tabletop games (eg, board games, card games, and role playing games) are harder to discern. The most rigorous study – conducted by Wizards of the Coast way back in 1999 – found women make up 19% of monthly players. “This represents a total population of several million active female hobby gamers,” Wizards adds.

Unlike the Wizards study, which was conducted with a random sample representative of the U.S. population, more recent studies have relied on recruitment through online gaming forums. This sampling bias has almost certainly skewed their results. Consider, for example, a 2010 user poll from Board Game Geek which found tabletop gaming to be virtually entirely male (94.4%).

It is, perhaps, not surprising that forum-based survey data would reveal a higher percentage of men than a random sample. Among the gaming community, it’s generally believed that female gamers are like air – they exist, but you never see them.

Presumably this is because the gaming community is notoriously misogynistic. A point, of course, most eloquently captured in the classic Dead Alewives Dungeons and Dragons sketch:

“Are there any girls there? Because if there are I want to do them!”

But, misogyny aside, it seems clear that somewhere between 5%-45% of the gaming population is female. With the Wizards study estimating that 2.25 million people play monthly, even conservative estimates would indicate a not insignificant number of female gamers in the country.

Surely, some of them must have been inspired by this experience?

Jennifer Grouling, Assistant Professor of English at Ball State University, is one of the foremost (or few) scholars of gaming. As she describes, her book, The Creation of Narrative in Table-top Role-Playing Games, “examines issues of narrative development and co-authorship in face-to-face role-playing games.”

One might infer that role playing has been a creative inspiration for her, but since personal development is not the focus of her scholarship, Grouling doesn’t really describe this dimension for any of her fellow players, much less herself.

Google searches for “women influenced by gaming,” “women influenced by tabletop games,” or “women influenced by D&D” yield disappointing results. (Did you mean, women who influenced history?)

Female gamers may exist mathematically, but they don’t exist as part of the narrative.

With a little digging, one can find lists of female video game designers, which is a good start, but still not what I’m looking for.

On the whole of the Internet, I managed to find one blog post from writer Freya Robertson discussing how gaming (video and tabletop) influenced her work. One post.

One post!

I know I shouldn’t be surprised – as the narrative of the original New York Times article indicates, while the gaming community as a whole has received more mainstream acceptance, it still exists on the fringes of the norm.

It’s not uncommon to hear people “admit” to being a gamer, or perhaps, to being a “former gamer. You know, when I was younger…” or my personal favorite, “…I tried that once…(but I didn’t inhale?).”

Google searches on “people influenced by gaming” and variations thereof, results in the New York Times article followed by…a smattering of debate on whether video games make you violent.

So it’s clear that gamers as a whole are still fighting to shake off that stereotype of the socially-inept, never-getting-any, teenage boy living in his parents basement. The community as a whole is still fighting for respect.

And when you’re fighting for respect, it’s easy to forget that your community has many sub-communities. That it’s not just about making male gamers an acceptable norm.

It’s about showing that we are a rich community of thoughtful, diverse people who dare to explore, engage, and create. That no matter who you are, gaming is not something to be ashamed of – in fact, it’s something to be proud of. And it’s about being a community where no matter who you are or what you’re into,  you can be yourself and find acceptance.

It’s about fighting together and demanding respect for all of us.

After all, female gamers are like global warming – real and undeniable.

If traditional economic policies can get our economy back to healthy growth that benefits average households (the old normal), then we can be optimistic about the future.

I don’t think, however, that we can return to the old normal. The conditions that made the old normal possible – lots of low-skill/well paying manufacturing jobs, strong labor bargaining power, less mechanization of jobs, less demand for higher education skills, unique global competitiveness – no longer exist. Nor have we developed policies to induce the new form of capitalism to benefit average households.

The perceptive political analyst William Galston reluctantly draws the inevitable inferences in a recent column in the Wall Street Journal. He personally favors old-normal economic policies. But he admits that the facts push him “to a more radical conclusion," namely, that “we need a …revised social contract that links compensation to productivity and…new policies to bring it about.” He realizes that there is no going back to the policies that worked in the past.

In the near future, momentous decisions need to be made. Do we accept as the new normal the reality that large numbers of Americans are no longer needed for the private sector job market of the future? If so, what do we do with all these “redundant” people?

It is unthinkable that these decisions should be left to experts and elites and that the public should have no effective voice in shaping a new social contract that addresses the failure of the economy to provide economic mobility for the majority of Americans.

This challenge cannot be met successfully without the American public becoming fully engaged in the process. A paralyzed national government in Washington, accustomed to kicking the can down the road, is grossly inadequate to the task.

People’s jobs define their standing in our society as well as determine their standard of living. If our new form of capitalism proves unable to support a labor market that provides enough good jobs, We the People need to grasp the issues and understand the far-reaching choices our society will have to confront.

Rebooting Democracy is a blog authored by Public Agenda co-founder Dan Yankelovich. While the views that Dan shares in his blog should not be interpreted as representing official Public Agenda positions, the purpose behind the blog and the spirit in which it is presented resonate powerfully with our values and the work that we do. To receive Rebooting Democracy in your inbox, subscribe here.

In the forthcoming collection, Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt University Press) soon available for advance order on Amazon.com and other sites, David Mathews, president of the Kettering Foundation, uses the evocative phrase "the struggle for the soul of higher education" to describe democratic trends in higher education contending with goals like cost cutting, preparation for today's jobs, and on-line education. The book collection also shows how the future of higher education is linked to the fate of the nation.

One way to look at the linkage is through examining the role which higher education plays in increasing inequality.

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty demonstrates rapidly rising inequality, especially in the United States. He shows that "this spectacular increase in inequality largely reflects an unprecedented explosion of very elevated incomes... a veritable separation of the top managers of large firms from the rest of the population."

Piketty argues that it "may be possible to explain [this separation] in terms of the history of social and fiscal norms." This argument was made at length by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, writing in his essay, "For Richer," more than a decade ago in the Times magazine. Krugman contrasted current norms with the democratic norms of the 1930s. "Much more than economists and free-market advocates like to imagine, wages -- particularly at the top -- are determined by social norms," Krugman said. "What happened during the 1930s and 1940s was that new norms of equality were established, largely through the political process. What happened in the 1980s and 1990s was that these norms unraveled, replaced by an ethos of 'anything goes.' And a result was an explosion of income at the top of the scale."

Neither Piketty nor Krugman draws connections between education and norms which legitimize exploding executive salaries but they are not hard to find. Higher education today embodies individualistic, hypercompetitive achievement norms which contribute to inequality in a number of ways. And it has enormous, if often unacknowledged, power shaping career plans of its students, disseminating conceptual frameworks throughout society, and helping to authorize "what counts" in the intellectual life of the nation.

As I noted in my recent blog on "We Need to Change the Narrative," a research report by Nicole Stephens and others, Unseen Disadvantage, shows that individualistic achievement norms common in American colleges and universities generate greater inequality among undergraduates. "Doing your own thing," "paving your own path," and "realizing your individual potential" are familiar values to middle and upper class students.

But such norms are experienced differently by students from poor and working class families. These students' "expectations for college center around interdependent motives such as working together, connecting to others, and giving back," Stephens reports. As first-generation college students from poor and working class backgrounds are exposed to the message of individual success and independence, a strong social class performance gap emerges.

The story of individual achievement as the goal of education is also communicated to the larger society through college recruitment. For years colleges and universities have highlighted higher education as mainly a ticket to individual advance. Today they sometimes advertise simply "return on investment," how much money students will make if they attend. John Dedrick of the Kettering Foundation, who has worked with hundreds of colleges and universities, observes that even Jesuit schools are putting "Return on Investment" calculators on their websites.

This story of education's aim as almost entirely individual success was once contested by a powerful counter-narrative which found expression in land grant colleges, state colleges and universities, religious schools, historically black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, community colleges and others. The democratic narrative also had many community expressions, from settlement houses to the citizenship schools of the civil rights movement.

This narrative, rooted in a diverse ecology of sites, was the democratic genius of American education. It is based on "cooperative excellence," not "meritocratic excellence." Cooperative excellence is the principle that a mix of people from highly varied backgrounds can achieve remarkable intellectual, social, political, and spiritual growth if they have encouragement, resources, challenges, and calls to public purpose.

The narrative once impacted colleges of all kinds. In 1908 Harvard president Charles Eliot argued, "At bottom, most of the American institutions of higher education are filled with the democratic spirit. Teachers and students alike are profoundly moved by the desire to serve the democratic community."

In today's world, the individualist, hyper-achievement narrative has been gaining ground, while the democratic narrative has been submerged. The movie Admission, directed by Paul Weitz, starring Tina Fey as Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at Princeton, shows the relentlessly competitive pressures which shape education today. When Nathan says to high school students, "I know your question is how to get into Princeton," the audience sees panic on their faces.

Yet the movie also has a counter-narrative, an alternative high school which is a working farm. Its students vigorously challenge the idea that going to Princeton should be the ultimate goal. The message of Admission can also be contrasted with The Great Debaters, a recent movie set in 1936, based on a true story. Directed by and starring Denzel Washington who plays the community organizer and English professor, Melvin Tolson, The Great Debaters tells the tale of Wiley, a small black college in East Texas, and its debate team. The team ends up beating Harvard in the national championship on national radio in a debate about the very meaning of America.

Amnesia about democratic narratives is a global pattern. In South Africa, Xolela Mangcu, a leading Black Consciousness intellectual at the University of Cape Town and another contributor to Democracy's Education observes that profound and rich democratic histories of intellectuals and educators, most if not all of them black, have been largely eclipsed in the official government version of the aims of schooling at every level -- individual success and job preparation.

If enormous forces erode the democratic story of higher education around the world, less visibly there are also signs of its revival. The contributors to Democracy's Education bring these to life. In the process they show how educators can shape their own story, not let it be defined by others with more narrow aims. They suggest how the revival of the democratic narrative of education holds profound implications for our future.

Indeed, it is a story crucial for addressing today's public challenges, whether rising inequality or anything else.

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Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, is editor of Democracy's Education.