Young Entrepreneurs

For too many kids inside our traditional K-12 system, we’ve never been able to connect them with what was once considered the best way to learn – the apprenticeship. For thousands of years this was the way young people learned almost everything, including how to read, write, and solve problems. The apprentice and their mentor faced life and work together, with each one gaining knowledge and skills along the way. And, more often than not, apprenticeship serves as the gateway to entrepreneurship, a way for each person to build a creative learning plan that benefits their growth as an individual and often times helps society out as a whole.

Recently, Matt Bowman, co-founder of OpenEd, a group that partners with innovative schools and families to create personalized learning paths, posted on article titled “Young Entrepreneurs Are Breaking Education Wide Open.” Bowman writes,

“When Olivia was 12, she did something most adults never attempt: she worked four different jobs, saved $2,100, and launched Mountain Blue Doodles, a specialized breeding business focused on training service and therapy dogs. No curriculum told her to do this. No standardized test measured it. Yet the education she received through building her business proved more powerful than anything she’d experienced in a traditional classroom.”

“’My parents loved me enough to allow me to fail,’ Olivia explains. ‘They understood that success often comes after numerous failures, and instead of preventing me from experiencing disappointment, they let me learn from my mistakes.’”

“Both Olivia and countless other young entrepreneurs I’ve worked with have demonstrated what I’ve come to believe: entrepreneurship is the ultimate education. At OpenEd, we partner with innovative schools and families to create personalized learning paths that break down the artificial barriers between different educational approaches. While we didn’t set out to focus on entrepreneurship, it consistently emerges as one of the most powerful forms of learning possible.”

“Aiden’s story follows a similar pattern. At 17, he asked a question no textbook assigned: ‘What if growing healthy food could be done with less work, less water, and no weeding ever?’ Using 3D modeling skills from an online course he took through OpenEd, he developed a prototype garden box. When customers pointed out flaws, he redesigned it – then redesigned it again. And again.”

“Within twelve months, his business generated over $150,000 in revenue, taught him more about engineering and marketing than years of traditional classes and solved a genuine environmental problem in his community.”

“’The things you learn when you create a real business are not in textbooks,’ Aiden reflects. ‘They’re things that you experience and see firsthand.’”

“For over a century, families have faced an artificial choice in education: public school, private school, or homeschool – pick one. This either/or mentality treats these approaches as separate, competing systems rather than what they are: different sets of resources that might benefit the same child at different times or in different subjects.”

“Entrepreneurship exposes this false choice for what it is. When a young person launches a business, they immediately need diverse knowledge and skills that no single educational approach can fully provide. It creates an authentic need to collaborate with others and begins to identify which interdisciplinary skills are essential for an entrepreneurial pursuit to thrive. A strong team has good writers, coders, designers, communicators, organizers, spreadsheet lovers, and more.”

“When Olivia decided to start her dog breeding business, her education instantly transcended conventional boundaries. She applied math skills first learned in a textbook, business knowledge acquired through online resources, hands-on animal husbandry expertise through apprenticeship, and legal information from community mentors.”

“The traditional approach would have forced her to choose: focus on school and put her business on hold, or leave school to pursue her passion. Instead, she created her own integrated path, blending elements from multiple sources.”

“What we call ‘open education’ – available to every family regardless of which type of school they attend – recognizes that learning happens most powerfully when it’s not confined to a single institution or approach. The entrepreneurial student naturally gravitates toward whatever resources best serve their purpose, regardless of which ‘box’ those resources come from. Their education becomes open not by academic theory, but by necessity and purpose.”

“Conventional education asks students to learn now and apply later – perhaps years later. Entrepreneurship reverses this equation. Application comes first, with learning pulled in as needed to solve real problems.”

“This reversal fundamentally changes how we measure success. In conventional education, we create artificial test environments to simulate real-world conditions. In entrepreneurship, the real world is the test.”

“The marketplace rewards creativity, research skills, persistence, teamwork, collaboration, and the ability to learn from mistakes – all qualities often discouraged in traditional testing.”

“When a student submits an essay on conservation for a grade, they’re operating in a test market where one person – the teacher – evaluates their work against predetermined criteria. When Aiden designed a garden box that uses 80% less water, the actual market tested his work. Real customers with real problems determined its value.”

“The market provides honest, unfiltered feedback about whether you’ve created something of value. And this feedback operates with remarkable democracy. It doesn’t care about your age, your background, or your learning differences – only whether you’ve created something worthwhile.”

“For students who’ve struggled in traditional environments, this represents a profound shift. Suddenly, their unique thinking styles – the very qualities that might have been labeled as problems in a standardized classroom – become potential strengths in the marketplace of ideas.”

…

“This entrepreneurial approach points toward something bigger: the possibility of truly open education that transcends the false choices families have faced for generations.”

“The question isn’t which educational box is best. The question is how we might break open all the boxes, allowing each learner to access whatever combination of resources they need.”

…

“These questions are being answered every day by young people like Olivia and Aiden, who refuse to accept the false choices the closed system created. They’re drawing lessons from traditional classrooms, online courses, community mentors, family wisdom, and market feedback – creating integrated learning experiences that defy our neatly labeled boxes.”

“They’re showing us that education can be truly open – not through sweeping policy changes, but through the simple, powerful act of creating something that matters. And in doing so, they’re teaching us something profound about learning itself: it happens not in isolated institutions but at the intersections where knowledge meets purpose, passion meets need, and individual growth meets community impact.”

“That’s a lesson worth spreading.”

Yesterday I wrote about underenrolled schools that suffer from “sucky” performance. Here’s challenge for any reader of ABPTL that has decision-making powers over these types of schools:

Take every young learner currently enrolled in these underenrolled, “sucky” campuses and sit them down, along with their families, and begin building a learning plan starting with an entrepreneurial apprenticeship that young learner has interest in pursuing. Take the money you would spend trying to fix that underenrolled, “sucky” school and reward existing businesses, non-profits, and other “open education” possibilities for partnering with these young learners in fulfilling their individualized learning plans. Spend time developing these young learners’ reading, writing, and problem-solving skills. And don’t forget to work on character development, which is one of the strengths entrepreneurships and apprenticeships bring to the table.

Honestly, what do you have to lose? Realistically, nothing.

Do you keep kids in these “sucky” schools while you try to fix them within a system that hasn’t worked for these kids, and their families, forever?

Or do you create something new and different to see if it’s better?

I know what I would do.

Til tomorrow. SVB