Should We Teach Children Entrepreneurship?

Can you teach entrepreneurship? It's an idea The Takeaway has explored before.

“We're very confident that this can be taught," Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, said on this program. "I think the problem is that while demand is surging, the supply of high-quality entrepreneurship education is not meeting that demand. Entrepreneurship has not been taken seriously and there's not a huge body of work out there on it. It's been more of kind of a black art.”

Aulet teaches college students how to build their own businesses. But what if the process started with even younger students? High schoolers or middle schoolers, or even younger? What if instead of waiting to talk about entrepreneurship in college classrooms, students started out really young?

Cristal Glangchai is founder of VentureLab in San Antonio, which offers a weeklong course for 5- to 7-year-old girls called Girl Startup 101—a course that pushes little girls to unleash their inner start-up maven. Six year-old Isabel Mendler has attended Girl Startup twice. Frederick Mendler, her father, knows a thing or two about start-ups as the co-founder of a recruitment-technology business called TrueAbility. He hopes his little girl will develop an entrepreneurial streak also. 

"When I was teaching at the university level, I found that it was really hard for me to get a lot of students, and girls in particular, into the entrepreneurship program," says Cristal, who is the mother of two 5-year-old daughters.

Cristal says she found that the college women she was teaching didn't have the confidence to pursue entrepreneurship and were intimidated by the male-dominated industry. After that experience, she says she wanted to instill the entrepreneurial spirit in girls much earlier on.

"I think that kids, even before they go to elementary school, need to learn that they can do anything," she says. "They can create, they can go into science, and they can go into technology. And just having that confidence to believe that they can turn their ideas into products, services or even start companies before they get into school."

For Isabel, early-life entrepreneurship is about testing the waters.

"You sort of can start your own business by like getting some friends and sort of practicing and then you can start your own business," the six-year-old says, who adds she would like to make a duct tape craft business, designing things like purses out of duct tape.

For Isabel's father Frederick, he sees programs like Girl Startup 101 as a way to teach his daughter independence. 

"As a co-founder of a start-up and being an entrepreneur myself, it's actually tough to influence her in the things I want to—I want to build independence and teach her the things that I've learned in maybe the only last 10 or 15 years of my life," he says.

While Fredrick says that he was skeptical about teaching entrepreneurship to a six-year-old, he says the Girl Startup 101 program allowed his daughter to brainstorm ideas and make creative products that were relevant to their age group.

"I was really proud," he says. "And those are things that I want her to learn at a young age so that they just become second nature for her in life."

For Cristal, this all about equipping young girls with the tools they need to be successful.

"The main thing I want them to have is confidence so that they can go out and take an idea and turn it into a product by doing market research, talking with as many customers as possible, really validating their idea, creating a prototype, coming up with a business model and then actually being able to present themselves and pitch confidently in front of investors," she says. "The whole entrepreneurial skill set."

So far Isabel has pitched to two great investors—her mom and dad—but says she wouldn't take no for an answer if she were turned by other investors, something that Fredrick says is the goal of the program.

"It's about her understanding that there's options and opportunities, and that she doesn't always have to rely on other people," he says. "The future is hers to define, and that resilience is there too—to try something and fail, and get back up and learn from that and continue on."