A high number of programs presently exist which focus on teaching children about entrepreneurship. Consequently, if children are being taught about entrepreneurship why not teach them about the positive version of entrepreneurship which is social entrepreneurship?
Social entrepreneurship is a version of entrepreneurship that aims at creating solutions for cultural, social and environmental issues. This is in contrast to the traditional entrepreneurship which focuses solely on wealth building and providing consumers proper services or products.
Social entrepreneurship education is one of the approaches recently emergent to be taught even from the preschool age. Through providing social entrepreneurship education, it is possible to develop children’s abilities and enable them to produce innovative solutions to social problems.
In order to achieve this, children need to meet social entrepreneurship education in their developmental period. Social entrepreneurship education, which is taken during preschool period, has many positive effects on children in terms of individualistic aspect. Social entrepreneurship education gives children a chance to experiment what is taught in the school through living in daily life, and in this way, it makes education lifelong by supporting all developmental areas of children. Moreover, because it is given in a critical period, it has important place in children’s life and has an impact on children’s academic and social success through both preschool and higher education. In this context, the aim of our project SENSES is to reveal the need of school entrepreneurship education and to identify individual benefits of social entrepreneurship education which can be applied in preschool education institutions in where children meet with education for the first time.
The most appropriate definition of social entrepreneurship would be that is the act of creating a venture or business that can help solve social problems or benefit society. For children, this can mean creating things to sell, providing a special service, or organizing an event to earn money for a cause, resulting in what many experts call “social value.”
Social entrepreneurship should be taught to kids for the same reason as any positive piece of knowledge: because kids easily assimilate it and later in life have a high chance of applying the knowledge they learned. Imagine a world where young entrepreneurs, instead of creating food ordering apps, online stores or mobile games they focus on issues such as solving the environmental crisis, uplifting impoverished communities, integrating migrants into the wider society etc. Many brilliant young minds working together in this regard will probably create solutions the many of these problems.
Moreover, social entrepreneurship develops a high number of useful skills that kids can use later in life. Examples of these skills included leadership, critical thinking, problem solving, commitment, teamwork and organizing skills. Thus, the world will be a better place if gifted young leaders would use their leadership skills to inspire people to better their communities instead of inspiring them to work just for extra profit.
Last but not least, social entrepreneurship or entrepreneurship focused on social reasons teaches kids that wealth can be accumulated in ethical ways. Social entrepreneurship brings many more benefits for the local community of the entrepreneur and to humanity in general, compared to traditional. Kids are at a stage in their life where they assimilate knowledge very easily and so can adapt and apply entrepreneurial skills, which will be important later in life.
With our project SENSES we aim to promote the values of SEI in kids, for more updates please check our social media page.