I recently read an article by Patricia Gray called “Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?” and it got me thinking. I found that many people depend on Entrepreneurs to shape the future of the economy. Statistically speaking, 80% of companies in America are small businesses, and 99% of the labor force is employed in such businesses. Based on that fact alone, I believed that Entrepreneurship can be taught in the classroom.

Before I read the article, I believed that Entrepreneurship was a philosophy which dealt with what others have done and based on them, try to find ways to avoid their mistakes, and capitalize even more on what they did right. Although the tagline of the article suggests that originality and risk taking are not things that can be taught, the purpose of an Entrepreneurship course would be to help you to harness the your creative intellect and decide for yourself what is right, what is wrong and why you should follow what you believe. The article describes how being entrepreneurial is like being a genius, and how you have to be born into it to be successful. Too bad I don’t believe that. People today have an unlimited freedom to broaden their minds.

The course has so much potential for college students everywhere, yet many people believe that the course is intended for only business students. Entrepreneurship isn’t only about making money; it’s about actively starting a business to fulfill a need. An art student could take this course and learn how to expand their creative horizons, or an Engineer can be taught how take an invention and market it.

Entrepreneurship was never meant to make a manager for hire; it was to reveal leaders to follow. Some leaders can just naturally shine and enjoy delegating responsibility while bearing the risk of sailing a ship in the wrong direction. Take Christopher Columbus for example, who dared to sail with nothing but a vision that his crew failed to share. Despite threats of a mutiny on board, Columbus continued forward. After a long journey he found the Americas. The article describes how Entrepreneurs will be the ones who will find the next big thing and bring it to the world. Entrepreneurship courses would teach them not the destination to go to, but which road you should chose.

Even if Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Steve Jobs were college dropouts turned billionaires, they didn’t find their passions outside of it, nor did they just quickly become billionaires. I do however agree with Steve Jobs, who believed he couldn’t see the value in the classes he took. There are too many distractions in everyone’s life, but wouldn’t an Entrepreneurship course teach you how to make everything fall into place? Such a course would teach you things like prioritization, decision-making, time management, future potentials, and applying the course to everyday life. Although we may not value courses equally, they each compliment each other so that students can improve their skills on a broader scale. The Entrepreneurship course would be the one though, that would link all of them together, giving students the ability to apply what they’ve learnt to real life problems, thus allowing them to develop the skills to build a business from scratch, like Bill Gates did.

I think Entrepreneurship is a great addition to one’s learning experience. But I do however believe that Entrepreneurship is something that you can’t learn from a book. It’s all about experiencing scenarios and applying what is learned to real life.