What entrepreneurship education ought to be about

India has always produced great entrepreneurs. While there is nothing novel about entrepreneurship in India, the level of interest in it has definitely risen exponentially in recent times. Education is paradoxically both an enabler and a challenge for entrepreneurship in India. The education system is not intended to encourage mugging up content or show how great you are at a particular subject.

Its intent is to help you figure out who you are, in the context of rest of the world, encourage creativity and contribution to society. The last educational policy reform was in 1991. Now the new government has launched an exercise to recreate and revisit our educational policy, 25 years later. Chances are that the fundamental tenets though will not change. Where we hit a block is on the issue of implementation.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide study by the OECD of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading conducted every 3 years. India last participated in the PISA survey in 2009 when it came up second from last out of 74 countries! Since then, India has refused to participate. The cause for the poor ranking is not a secret – it is lack of application.

Our education system ought to prepare independent thinkers, critical thinkers, great collaborators, innovators, people who do well for themselves and contribute to the society. Unfortunately, our efforts are lost in cramming and getting 99.9% in 10th / 12th or cracking JEEs or cracking CAT. That’s all, cracking.

This is an attitudinal problem for encouraging entrepreneurship since entrepreneurship begins by first asking why not. How can I change a status quo? If there is pollution in Delhi, what can I do to fix it? What could we do to fix it? If children are not learning in our schools, what’s the solution? What can I do differently? So, it starts with the part that says it is needed and it’s possible; you’ve got to think differently. Independence, confidence and some innate ability to think differently are essentials that unfortunately our education system doesn’t instill. So the trouble is in supply of entrepreneurs from this kind of a system. Geniuses are the very rare exception rather than the norm.Entrepreneurship education has to start with the basics. It is not about teaching how to start a business or creating a business plan. In fact, we could be teaching sociology, physics, history, engineering or any other subject. Our first job is to build the foundational skill set that unfortunately our schooling system has failed to do. This has to do with developing independent, critical, creative, analytical, and non-cognitive ways of thinking. This will help you to answer questions like:

What do you want in life? What excites you? How are you working on yourself? How do you get along with others? Essentially, we should not mean to teach entrepreneurship in our university. What we should be teaching people is how to think, behave or act like an entrepreneur. To discover yourself. Naturally, this way of thinking is equally relevant whether you intend to be an entrepreneur or you just want to be a more effective employee.Just like we advise budding entrepreneurs to focus on the basics of building great businesses, similarly, our focus on entrepreneurial education should be to develop foundational capacities in students to have the courage to change the world.

By Ajay Batra
Head, Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Bennett University