Why Teach Business to Schoolchildren?
At the end of August 2016, we launched our first educational program on entrepreneurship for secondary school students, called Startup Academy Junior.
There is a social experiment with some specially prepared people sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. When a signal is heard at regular intervals, they stand up for a moment and then sit down again. An unsuspecting person comes in, and after a couple of signals, he or she starts to stand up too. When everyone else leaves, this person continues to stand up by inertia, “infecting” new unsuspecting visitors. We rely on the findings from this experiment, and the point is that it can be used for good. To put it crudely, if you repeatedly tell people that entrepreneurship is socially approved, starting in their childhood, maybe, they will come to think of creating their own business.
How We Started
We started with studying best practices of our foreign colleagues. We looked at dozens of similar American and European programs provided on the basis universities and business schools. Frankly speaking, they are all almost identical. There are next to no Russian analogues, and they are limited to occasional lectures and workshops. So, we deliberately removed the unnecessary theoretical basis from our “grownup” program, adapted it for children and added some ideas.
Our students were 13 to 16-year-olds. I expected to see some naive children, but they were tough guys who knew exactly what they wanted and were not afraid to look us in the eye. Their purpose was not to study business, but to learn something outside the usual school program – something interesting about how the economy and the whole world works. They had a brilliant opportunity to try on adult life for a week.
Here are some of the lessons we learned:
- We should turn down the intensity of our lectures. We were amazed by how much our participants could grasp, but still, there were very tired by the end of the program.
- We need to add some practice, like visiting an alumnus’ business.
- The next program, if we do it, will be more expensive. The fee was about 650 dollars for 10-days programme, and we were sold out in record time – 35 places were bought within a day.
What Is Next
Will our participants develop their ideas? I think many of them will drop out very quickly. It was a breath of fresh air, but now they realize that it is necessary to learn non-stop, to go to various courses and meet interesting people. Thirty-five children tried the role of entrepreneurs, and almost all felt that was a positive and interesting experience. There will be other programs of this type in the future.
Our project has already become well-known on the State level. Recently the best student of our academy (Olga Tokareva) has been personally awarded by the First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Igor Shuvalov in the White House.
Mikhail Khomich, the author of Startup Academy Junior educational program, SKOLKOVO Business School