Teaching Entrepreneurship in Schools – Webinar

Should entrepreneurship be taught in schools?

  • Entrepreneurship should indeed be taught in schools because we need to catch them young. The children are at their creative best between the ages of 9 to 18. Hence, we need to provide them the right tools and mentorship to help them flourish by ideating and execution.
  • If we look at the world, most of the European countries have already introduced enterprise education into the school curriculum. We can start teaching entrepreneurship in schools from as early as grade 1 because life skills are very crucial and it takes years to acquire life skills.
  • The enterprise education will help students develop skills like personal finance, decision making, creative thinking, and many more. We need to produce a curriculum that helps the students learn crucial life skills in a play-way method.
  • The term ‘Teaching Entrepreneurship in Schools’ refers to helping the children develop the mindset and values of an entrepreneur at an early stage in their life. In terms of operating parameters, we need to have stories for school kids so that they can easily relate to entrepreneurship.

The Way Forward

  • We need to mass scale the enterprise education so there has to be a program for the teachers to do the pedagogical skills training and for the students to understand, imbibe, and then take it forward.
  • We need to train teachers on a mass scale and use ICT as a tool to reach out to all the teachers so that they realise the importance of enterprise education. And to create an impact we need to massify this.
  • If startups partner with schools, it will be a win-win situation for both startups and the schools because the startups which have been built on a creative idea need to go back to the school to keep their creative juices on. Hence, the schools also need to create an environment that is more than welcoming to the startup world.
  • The school principals should reach out to all the startups to adopt the schools. So that they provide the required motivation and life lessons to the students. We need to create a totally different society by changing the mindset of the students and the parents with respect to entrepreneurship.

The Challenge

  • If we look at our glorious past, we have been the knowledge hub for the entire world. Therefore, if we start believing in ourselves then producing entrepreneurs won’t be a difficult task for us. We need to reach the remotest areas of our country and arm the gurus with the requisite knowledge.
  • To put together a program of entrepreneurship and to deliver it you require some skills. We need a structure that can be taught and imbibed by our teachers then only we can say that our teachers are prepared to teach entrepreneurship.
  • To teach learning by doing in our classrooms firstly we need to reduce the curriculum load and we can call out skills that are overlapping. Also, there is a need for master trainers to impart those skills, and developing new lesson plans will be extremely helpful.
  • For a subject like entrepreneurship, the answer lies in technology. Each person’s experience with entrepreneurship is different hence we need to create an ecosystem to scale the learning.

The Way Forward

  • We need to mass scale the enterprise education so there has to be a program for the teachers to do the pedagogical skills training and for the students to understand, imbibe, and then take it forward.
  • We need to train teachers on a mass scale and use ICT as a tool to reach out to all the teachers so that they realise the importance of enterprise education. And to create an impact we need to massify this.
  • If startups partner with schools, it will be a win-win situation for both startups and the schools because the startups which have been built on a creative idea need to go back to the school to keep their creative juices on. Hence, the schools also need to create an environment that is more than welcoming to the startup world.
  • The school principals should reach out to all the startups to adopt the schools. So that they provide the required motivation and life lessons to the students. We need to create a totally different society by changing the mindset of the students and the parents with respect to entrepreneurship.