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Entrepreneurs and Education
This is something I wrote in 2004 for a high school student (named Daniela) in Ecuador who asked me for my ideas about a speech she neeed to write about competitiveness and the national economy. S. Hein -- The intial thought I had: for a country to be competitive economically it needs entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs start businesses. They create jobs. They create new products, new services. But to be an entrepreneur you must believe in yourself. You must have enough self-confidence to take risks. You must be a non-conformist. But the schools here create conformists. Conformity and obedience is the highest value. New ideas are not valued. Most of the teachers and school directors want to keep doing things the same way they have been done for hundreds of years. How much have schools really changed in two hundred years? One difference is it is supposedly illegal to hit students now. But in some schools in Ecuador they are still being hit. And even if they are not being hit they are being punished and threatened on a regular basis. Punishments and threats create fear. They are based on the use of fear to control people. People who are raised on fear are not likely to want to take risks. So they will not be likely to become entrepreneurs. If you ask 100 people what the goal of education is, at least 90 will say it is to get a job. This implies a job working for someone else. Schools do not encourage students to think about becoming entrepreneurs. Teachers don't think outside of the box. They wouldn't be working in schools if they could. Teachers come from a certain subset of society. They come from a group of people who are obedient and who are conformists. They obey the school director's rules. They conform to society's status quo. They can not be expected to teach non-conformity and creativity when this is not part of their personality. And if it was, it was slowly destroyed by years of being in schools and universities both as "students" and "teachers." People who are non-conformists can not stand to be inside an orgainzation where conformity and obedience are so greatly demanded. They can not stand to be in an organization which is for all practical purposes a dictatorship. So the system filters out these people. The ones who are left as teachers are obdient conformists who are afraid to take risks. Therefore they can not be expected to be role models for students who have the potential to be entrpreneurs. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, left Harvard to start his company. But how many of his teachers would have encouraged him to do this? How many saw him as an individual? How many saw his individual potential? How many believed in him? If a high school student wanted to leave high school to start his or her own company, how many teachers would support this? How many parents would? But that is just part of the problem with our educational system and our entire value system. We think about money. But what about helping people? What if a high school student wanted to leave high school and help children or pregnant teenagers who have been kicked out of school because it hurts the image of the school? How many teachers or parents would support this? Or what if they wanted to go travel? Let's think about traveling for a minute. When a person travels they gain new experiences. They learn from other cultures. Doesn't it make it more likely they will be able to get new ideas which they can take back to the country they were born in? Isn't this a good thing? Isn't it likely to help them do something which either a) makes money or b) helps people or c) both? But in this country a teenager is not free to go traveling. They can not get a passport unless their parents give them permission. And there are not many scholarship programs available for teenagers who want to travel. If you go to a typical government high school and ask who has ever been out of South America, chances are you will not find one person in a hundred. Or ask how many teachers have ever travelled abroad or lived in another country or culture. Chances are you won't find many, if any, in a typical government high school. In an expensive private school there is a higher chance students or teachers have travelled. But is this fair? Is it good for the country to only have those with money being able to travel? And let's think about foreign languages. Every one knows that English is the universal language now. If you want to do business with people in other countries, you must be able to speak English. Not just read it, but speak it and have conversations in English. But anyone who has lived in Ecuador knows that after 12 years of public education, an 18 year old still can not have a basic conversation in English with a native speaker. Yet again, if the parents have money, they can afford to send their children to a private school where the tuition might be from 100 to 800 dollars per month. Is this fair and is it good for the country or the world? By the way, if there are too many things in a society that are perceived as not fair, the people feel resentful. They feel disillusioned. They start to lose motivation. They think things like, "What is the point in trying when I will never be able to change the system?" Without self-motivatated people nothing much is going to happen in a country. Now let's think about responsibility for a while. In this country, teenagers are not given responsibility. They are told what to do, how to do it and when to do it. They are not given freedom to make their own choices. Many if not most teenagers move from one building, called their home, to another, called their school. They are told when to go and when to come back. Inside these buildings they are often treated as prisoners with no right to leave. Sheep have more freedom than many students in schools. Sheep can eat when they want and can move around the pasture or sleep at will. But teenagers are told to stay inside one small room where they are packed in tightly together until they are given persmission to leave. If they are sleepy and put their head down to rest, chances are they will get in trouble. But no one tells sheep they can't rest when they are tired. And teenagers can't walk out and get something to eat when they are hungry. But when sheep are hungry, they eat. They are not afraid of getting punished for eating when they are hungry or drinking when they are thirsty, or getting up to look for food or water. But students are afraid. They are not allowed to simply get up and go get something to eat or drink. And students have to ask permission to go to the bathroom. Sheep can take care of their bodily functions whenever nature tells them to, they don't have to ask permission to take a dump! Does creating a nation of human beings who have less freedom than sheep make the country more competitive?
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