Young Entrepreneurs & The Shape of Things to Come

I had an interesting chat today with a senior representative of Young Enterprise, a charitable organisation which seeks to develop and promote entrepreneurial spirit amongst children and young people.

I inherently like what they do and the conversation deepened, at my prompting, to consider the explicit or implicit political position which such activity could possibly entail (as a charity, Young Enterprise is a-political).

The efforts we make in steering the development and career choices of our children are hard wired, I believe, to our visions of the kind of society which we wish to create.

In lighting sparks of entrepreneurial activity we are valorising broad scale values such as ambition and creativity but we are also narrowing-in on an endorsement of profit-driven productivity and capitalist methods of production and accumulation.

Again, I inherently like this focus, just as long as there is a balancing priotity in that we encourage children to be the best they can on their own terms, without insisting that they all emerge from the same mould and with the same ambitions and proclivities.

But that moves us into another contentious area – the squaring of fairness with meritocracy, with pragmatism and with an eye to economic sustainability. On one hand we can opt for a great levelling, where the best guarantee of “fairness” becomes a homogenised mediocrity. Or we can opt for hot-housing perceived talent and in so doing risk all manner of things, from clumsy elitism to borderline eugenics.

Yet these debates need to be had. Where is the fairness in churning out successive generations of university students holding degrees with little commercial leverage whatsoever? Where is the fairness in having radically de-emphasised specifically vocational training across swathes of third level provision?

I believe that we need to be nurturing an economic future that is massively more productive in its creative capacities but which is also massively more effective in its abilities to care.

Whatever of my views, Young Enterprise is to be commended for its recognition that the shape of things of come needs to be grounded back in the emergent passion and action of entrepreneurial citizenship and not left to the traditional short-termism of successive administrations.

Let’s all talk a lot more about what we hope our youngsters can build.

- Author Malcolm Evans is a corporate culture specialist and a generalist social theory and economic policy commentator: http://malcolmevans.org