The eduFire Blog

Jeff used a word recently that I love: Teacherpreneur. Personally, I’m fascinated by the intersection of education and entrepreneurship. Why? Let me list thee reasons…

#1 – Education has had almost no entrepreneurship. Ever. Try this mental exercise. Think of a teacher who made a million dollars. Or one who invented something revolutionary. Or created a “disruptive” teaching method or technology. Yeah, no doubt there are some examples. But there are so few and far in between as to cause one to shake their head.

#2 – Education is a huge industry with lots of value flowing in and out. Students pay tuition. Parents pay for tutoring, supplemental classes and books. Teachers get paid. Publishers make insane margins. And yet what do we typically see year after year…status quo. Compare this with other areas of society that are moving at hyper-speed right now. You kinda get the feeling that if entrepreneurs didn’t get involved then teaching would be pretty much the same in 10/20/30/40 years. Fortunately, the entrepreneurs are getting involved.

#3 – Why shouldn’t there be an opportunity to set up your home-based education business? 10 years it was *really* difficult to set up a home-based business selling products. Now, because of people like this it’s insanely easy. Not just the tech either…the support. The community. The whole experience that causes people to spend their entire day on Etsy even if it’s only bringing them a few hundred dollars a month.

#4 – Teachers are bright people. OK, not all of them. :) But so many of them are creative, brilliant, innovative, etc. Yet for decades they’ve been stuffed inside this little box and told what to teach, how to teach, when to teach, etc. Essentially emasculated by a stifling system that punishes, rather than rewards, fresh approaches and contrarian thinking.

#5 – It didn’t always used to be this way. Here’s a mind-blowing quote from Gatto’s A Different Kind of Teacher:

Before the so-called “progressive” era in this country there was a vast and impressive non-system of great diversity and autonomy in American education. No one claimed there was any one “best system” and attempted to force it on everyone. According to Lawrence Cremin, a historian of American schools, “Virtually anyone who could command a clientele could conduct classes…Anyone could teach and anyone could learn — and the market, rather than the church or the legislature, governed through many types of contractual relationships.” It was this interplay of opportunities that created the resourcefulness, the industry, and the ingenuity that President John Adams associated with New England town and which dazzled the world.

You can basically break the world into two types of people. The people who figure that the world will never change and do there best to fit themselves into the world the way it is. And the people who know the world will only change if people like themselves refuse to accept the status quo. Or in RFK’s words:

There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

We’re gonna do the latter and therefore we’re gonna ride the teacherpreneur meme. There are 144 results on Google right now for that term.

Let’s hope that when all is said and done there are a few million results. Can’t think of something that would move the world more.

First is the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills — against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world’s great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. “Give me a place to stand,” said Archimedes, “and I will move the world.” These men moved the world, and so can we all. – RFK

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