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The 1997 merger of two USDA agencies, the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service and the Farmers Home Administration, into the Farm Service Agency created a need for consistent finance training. A highly successful Penn State Cooperative Extension borrower training program was selected to provide national financial training to more than 850 new staff and former loan technicians, and former ASCS staff and district directors. Analysis of workshop evaluations, based on pre‐workshop knowledge levels, identified five distinct clusters of trainees differing substantially in terms of experience, age, knowledge of finance principles, and job classification within FSA. However, evaluations confirmed testing results that the financial training was equally effective across all clusters. A critical result was that the training was successfully adapted to accommodate the distinct needs of each trainee cluster.

My main point is that the 1920s Chicago School got its scholastic or school-like quality primarily from its notion of what a human being is, from its social psychology, and only secondarily from its sociology. These sociologists developed the novel idea that humans are constituted by symbolic or cultural elements, not biological forces or instincts. They applied Franz Boas's discovery of culture to human nature and the self. In particular, they showed that ethnic groups and their subcultures are not biologically determined or driven by fixed instincts. In the 1910s and 1920s, the Americanization movement held that ethnic groups could be ranked on how intelligent, how criminal, and therefore how fit for democracy they were. This powerful movement, the extreme wing of which was lead by the Northern Ku Klux Klan, advocated different levels of citizenship for different ethnic groups. The Chicago sociologists spear-headed the idea that humans have a universal nature, are all the same ontologically, and therefore all the same morally and legally. In this way, they strengthened the foundations of civil liberties. The Chicago professors advanced their position in a quiet, low-keyed manner, the avoidance of open political controversy being the academic style of the time. Their position was nevertheless quite potent and effective. The actual sociology of the school, also quite important, was largely an expression of the democratic social psychology. In addition, the sociology was dignified and elevated by the moral capital of their theory of human nature.

This talk is about the future. There is only one certain thing we know about the future and that is that we know nothing about the future.