Educating Public School Kids About Entrepreneurship

Yesterday, DreamStarters teamed up with Tomorrow's Entrepreneurs to educate 6th -8th graders at Pittsburgh Traditional Academy about entrepreneurship. It will be a 12 week course that covers 1 step each week. The first step was all about connecting problems in the community with individual passions and coming up with creative solutions. It was incredible to see how the kids responded to their first experience with their own business possibilities.

I believe that students are groomed to have the employee mindset - they are told what they can and cannot do, they are told to have a rigid time schedule, and they are forced to do work they have no interest in doing. Although these are all extremely valuable in society, it begins to ingrain a mentality that you must only go to work because someone is watching over you and not because you want to work.

One of the hardest things an entrepreneur must learn to do is hold themselves accountable for their own actions, deadlines, and views on how to problem solve a situation. The point of our program is to start planting the seed in students that creating your way through life via entrepreneurship can be rewarding intrinsically and financially. Business owners are the ones that create jobs, increase innovation, and help build up the community. If you want more of something, you must reward it.

The more people that think like a business owner, the better off we will be in this world. In addition, the more exposure a person gets about entrepreneurship early on in life, there is a better chance of succeeding when it does come time to start a business. Failure is so overwhelmingly common in the startup world. Maybe, just maybe, we can do our part to help change that outcome.

Below are some pictures of our first class.