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 Why Bother?
Teaching
entrepreneurial concepts and skills is challenging and exciting. It brings
to the classroom a unique perspective as curricula help students recognize
the very real potential to Own Your Own. However, if
entrepreneurship education is to have real impact, instructors must do
their homework, embrace the value of managed risk, and focus on
identifying specific learning goals.
It’s easy enough to
talk about one day owning a business. It’s far more challenging to create
a learning environment where students truly learn to manage risk, develop
specific business skills, and address the day-to-day challenges that all
entrepreneurs must face. It takes a special kind of teacher who can help
students experience entrepreneurial philosophies even as they learn
specific technical and academic concepts and skills that can help make the
dream a reality.
So why bother?
Programs that develop entrepreneurial philosophies and specific
business skills create value—for students specifically, and for the
overall positioning of courses, programs, and schools. For example,
effective, applied entrepreneurship education can:
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Provide key
lifelong values and skills for most
students, regardless of career aspirations— from aspiring auto mechanics
to would-be lawyers, from students excited about nature to those who are
interested in medicine.
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Encourage
innovative, creative thought.
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Teach
problem-solving and decision-making
behavior with immediate and lifelong value.
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Encourage
strategic planning values.
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Position
risk-taking
as a planned, benefit-oriented, analytical approach
to all aspects of life and career.
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Contribute to the
community’s economic vitality.
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Increase interest of individual students in
many different classes as they see the relationship of their learning to
future ventures.
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Provide a context
for teaching many academic skills—particularly
math, language, social studies, and social sciences.
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Contribute to the
significance and potential impact of many
career-tech programs.
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Increase learning expectations in all
career-tech programs.
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Provide a vehicle
for embedding core academic skills in all
programs.
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Lend credibility
to both specific courses and programs, and to the entire
education institution as communities recognize education’s increased
relevance to individual students and to needs of the community in
general.
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Provide a
focal point for a broad range of projects
and activities—from term papers to math assignments, from senior
projects to college thesis.
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Develop a philosophy
that can contribute to each individual’s success—as
owner, employer, or student—as each learns the economic and social value
of entrepreneurial positioning and behavior in virtually all settings.
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