Sir, – Ibec has called for teachers to get entrepreneurial training ("Ibec calls on teachers to be trained in entrepreneurial thinking", August 20th). Anyone not reading past the headline might baulk at the suggestion.
While education should be about lighting a fire rather than filling a pail, there is enormous potential benefit to students who have been taught to look for opportunities that add value to society.
It doesn’t have to be financial value per se but there’s no harm in learning how to make a living either.
Entrepreneurial thinking in education is a developing idea and there are a number of European Union initiatives supporting it.
In Ireland, the Innovation Academy in UCD runs a programme specifically to train teachers in entrepreneurial thinking.
Learning how to identify opportunities for innovation – social and cultural, as well as financial – and developing creative initiatives are valuable skills that equip students for the 21st century. And it doesn’t have to be at the expense of all we hold dear in education at present. – Yours, etc,
PETER LYDON,
Clondalkin,
Dublin 22.
Sir, – Una Mulally's thought-provoking piece "'Mistress America' reflects the myth of self-starters" (Opinion & Analysis, August 24th), regarding the insecurity of employment and the trumpeting of the virtue of entrepreneurs, might be usefully summed up by her observation, "the problem with the self-starter culture is that not everyone can be an entrepreneur".
While this logic should be self-evident, incrementally this lauding of the merit of the individual in the place of collective enterprise has taken over as intellectual currency in many quarters.
An increasingly greedy society, with toothless trade unions, now promotes a working culture where zero-hour contracts and the like have become, in just a few short years, acceptable.
The resultant individual stress which Una Mulally refers to leads to social isolation and resultant illnesses, all which slip quietly under the statistical radar. Society is synonymous with an economy. Society is duly diminished.
Worryingly, the employers’ group Ibec recently stated its desire to have “teachers trained in entrepreneurial thinking so it can be introduced at the earliest stage in young people’s schooling” with “the concept . . . made mainstream at primary, secondary and third level to deliver the skills needed for the future workplace”.
I surely can’t be the only person to find the notion of children as young as six or seven being indoctrinated in such a fashion, for something only a small minority will actually have a natural flair for, to be a highly disturbing “development”! – Yours, etc,
JD MANGAN,
Stillorgan,
Co Dublin.