she could give back by building a whole different thing that transcends school, and let impoverished girls be the first to flourish and show it can be done (keep calling it school or get a different word, just so it's nothing like what "school" has come to mean.)

Walt Disney didn't just build another amusement park like those we all knew, except fancier. What he gave back was something much bolder and riskier, something that hadn't existed for his family or any other, ever in history. He created it! And the world quickly followed because it was so obviously progress. Think of everything else that has changed in our culture and economy concurrently (and how it spread to Japan and France, etc.)

Oprah all by herself (I think) could pull off that kind of reimagination of learning and developing young talent, something not schooling at all. Maybe instead of Walt Disney, she could do more of an MLK "I have a dream" charge to our third-millennium conscience, about what the world will be like when our little children aren't judged by the content of their standardized test score booklets. She could reimagine learning and education systems and traditions so radically different than the social traps we can't seem to break free of, that she really could change the world.

The point wouldn't be to make a few more girls into relative winners in the existing systems, but rather to help every family believe their dreams can come true by creating a better future for all learning.

If anyone can get completely outside the learning and thinking box for personal growth and development of whole new minds a la Daniel Pink, it would be Oprah. She can afford it and anyone in the WORLD would help her if she asked. What an opportunity!

Or she could just build another school and make herself headmistress.