entrepreneurship education is ineffective

welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj, a 19 y/o always up to something in social good x tech.

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onto today’s topic: entrepreneurship education is ineffective 👩‍🏫 

picture this: it’s the first day of your entrepreneurship 101 class and you’re reading through the syllabus. you take a look at your professor’s bio and realize they have never once started a company — safe for selling lemonade when they were 6 years old.

that strikes me as strange. with the way that entrepreneurship courses are currently structured, i believe they’re pointless. entrepreneurship is action driven, not knowledge-driven. it’s not a subject to be taught, but a skill to be practiced, and that’s not executed properly in majority of the existing entrepreneurship programs in the world. 🌎️ 

i’ve been meaning to write about this topic for a while and was reminded through a conversation with my friend aadya where we were reflecting on how a number of soft-skills have been repacked as entire courses and/or majors. you can learn as much as you want about entrepreneurship, leadership, time management, or communication, but it’s useless unless you’re actually gaining relevant experience and honing the skill.

a course de-risks learning, and most learning is derived from making mistakes and taking those risks. you’re not going to found a unicorn startup because you scored an a+ in an entrepreneurship exam. that’s ridiculous. 😭

starting a business is like the journey to becoming a pro-athlete. are you going to spend hours learning how to run? what plays to make? what food to eat?

hell no. you’re going to run races, face injury, train, fail, talk to coaches/teammates, succeed, and everything in between.

school doesn’t tolerate failure, yet failure is what entrepreneurship is all about.

with the way school is structured in our society, entrepreneurship education will never work.

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