By Imlisanen Jamir
There is a fashionable idea drifting through classrooms and policy meetings alike, repeated with the confidence of a slogan that has not been properly examined. Children, we are told, must be taught to become entrepreneurs. Not to look for jobs but to create them. It has a fine, stirring ring to it, like something printed on a poster beside a sunrise. One can almost hear the applause before anyone has asked the obvious question of who, precisely, is meant to do the jobs once they have been created.
The matter is usually dismissed with a shrug. Someone will answer the phones. Someone will keep the accounts. Someone will assemble the product that the enterprising child has dreamed up in a classroom exercise. These someones, one gathers, will simply appear, as if summoned by the force of ambition itself. It is a comforting thought, though not a particularly serious one.
The truth is less poetic. A society cannot be composed entirely of founders any more than an army can consist entirely of generals. The difficulty lies not in encouraging initiative, which is harmless enough, but in pretending that initiative is a universal calling. Most people, if given the choice, prefer competence to risk, and a steady craft to a permanent gamble. There is nothing especially noble in persuading a child to dream of owning a company if one has neglected to teach him how companies actually function once the dreaming is over.
One begins to suspect that the language of entrepreneurship is attractive precisely because it avoids these duller questions. It allows the speaker to talk of vision and disruption without mentioning invoices, logistics, or the small, repetitive acts that keep any enterprise from collapsing by Tuesday afternoon. In this sense it resembles a kind of moral theatre, in which everyone is encouraged to imagine themselves as the hero of a venture, while the supporting cast is quietly written out of the script.
What becomes of those who do not fit the part is rarely discussed. They are described, when they are described at all, as people who “did not make it,” which is an odd way of referring to the very individuals upon whom every successful venture depends. The electrician who keeps the lights on, the clerk who balances the books, the driver who ensures that anything actually arrives where it is meant to go, these are not failed entrepreneurs. They are the reason the entrepreneur has something to boast about.
If schools are to teach anything of use, they might begin by abandoning the fantasy that one size of ambition fits all. There is no disgrace in learning how to do a job well, nor is there a shortage of such jobs, despite what the slogans suggest. A child who understands how work is organised, how responsibility is shared, and how value is created at every level is far better prepared than one who has merely been told to think big.
It would be a modest reform, and therefore an unlikely one. It lacks the glamour of the word entrepreneur. Yet it has the advantage of being true.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
