What are the skills needed to run a small business successfully?

Education Reform and Disruption: What would the impact be if high schoolers had to demonstrate the skills to start and run a small, local, service business in order to receive a diploma?

• This is a follow-on to It is followed by The modern high school was designed to provide factories with ready industrial workers, but with the rise of globalization and automation that is no longer the dominant need of the American economy. Expecting everyone to go to a four-year college (at likely great expense and debt) is unreasonable. What if in order to receive the basic academic credential in the US, students were required to have a command of basic entrepreneurship? What obstacles would there be to implementing this? What specific skills might need to demonstrated? What might the curriculum/curricula be like? How could you tailor the curricula to students' personal interests? What would the potential positive impacts be? What would the potential negative impacts be?

• Answer:

  This is a scary requirement for anyone, let alone a young person. Most of my working life has been self-employed. It requires more cajones than most people are willing to grow. Autonomy I think the very idea of a high school diploma is misguided. Certificates of most kinds - especially non-rigorous ones - communicate little about a person. I would prefer a non-institutional version of this sort of curriculum. For example, I'm happy to teach anyone who asks me to make a modest living copywriting. I've done so more than once at no charge. Real work is always preferable to simulated work, except in cases where major mistakes can lead to catastrophes. For example, bridge engineers need to train for a while before it's safe to allow them to build a suspension bridge. Customer service representatives, on the other hand, take less time to train, even though their potential mistakes could cause financial damage to a company. Yet young people have been conditioned to ignore the many apprenticeship and internship oppurtunities available to them in favor of classwork. The education system expropriates the most valuable years of their lives to focus on pointless schooling so they can't self-actualize. This is why so many college-aged young people feel as if they "don't know what to do with their lives." Adults have made all their decisions for them, even throughout their biological adulthood. I disbelieve in the concept of "rights," but the system violates the sense of agency that young people should otherwise be developing. The laws disallow them from making free economic, sexual, and political choices. And just about every teenager hates it and reacts against it through various avenues of "slave rebellion." I think a 10 year old who started reading 's Copyblogger would be a superior writer at 16 years relative to a 24-year-old with an MFA from . To boot, the Copyblogger-educated person would receive the entire education for free, while the Yalie would likely need to go deep into debt for the Boolah-Boolah experience. End Youth Apartheid It's time to recognize that young people are humans who deserve respect, autonomy, and dignity. Adults should stop placing all these walls, barriers, and chains onto the shoulders of the weakest and most helpless members of society. Parents can help by being less gullible consumers of education. Stop pretending like the public education system will be reformed. There are no magical Tiger Moms like who will roar at your local school and force them to teach math competently. The purpose of education isn't to teach a child to become a powerful, free individual. It's to socialize people into obedience. Stop enabling private universities. Stop enabling public universities. Stop telling teenagers that they just need to go to college, follow the rules, and that everything will work out just fine for them. Technological and social change accelerates too quickly for anyone but an autodidact to thrive. I also think it's wise to cease placing such high importance on age and to instead focus on behavior. Too many people automatically devalue whatever a young person might have to say merely because they're young. Who people are is less important than what they do and say. People who will decry racism will think nothing of exercising prejudice against the young. It's illegal to discriminate in hiring based on race, but we're forced to discriminate against the young. The law considers the young to be sub-human. They can be prosecuted as adults for certain crimes, but have none of the privileges the state allows adults to have. It's time to end youth apartheid. We're actively wasting the futures of our young people and our society. We're sacrificing their lives to a dead god that no one believes in anymore. Like any huge social change, this would create many winners and losers. Bringing youth back into the labor market could easily depress wages for many professionals. This is one reason why there's almost no constituency for it. It would also render many bureaucratic, educators, and service providers out of a job until they could adjust to the new way of society. Oh well! Concentration camp guards, plantation overseers, Luftwaffe pilots, Lysenko geneticists, British Colonial Governors, and Spanish Inquisitors all had to find new jobs too, once upon a time. Big deal! When teenagers call out for more autonomy, it's usually dismissed with the sort of common bigotry that our society has come to accept. For my part, I say "bring on the competition." In the long run, however, our living standards will improve, we'll be rid of the recent failed social invention called "adolescence," and more people will find a place in society that they can feel proud of. Families will probably strengthen, because the early years of child-rearing will be more focused on engendering autonomy and self-respect. As many parents can attest, raising a teenager is really like having a tenant that pays no rent that often hates every moment of living with you. Corporations Should Pay the Cost of Educating Workers Currently, corporations expect the government and the banking system to cover the cost of educating workers. This has failed in every way imaginable at every conceivable level. Training and teaching new workers can be accomplished at much lower cost than before, thanks to information technology. The classroom is completely obsolete. A lot of low-value education can be distributed through inexpensive rich media channels. More high-touch tasks can be taught one-on-one. The true economic gains from the internet will be realized over the next 20 years, as a new generation replaces the creaking olds who were educated in our Soviet-era system.