Entrepreneurship and magic

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Xavier Massó

Throughout its existence on Earth, humanity has built three great models in order to explain itself and the world around it: magical or mythical thinking, religious or theological thinking, and rational, logical and scientific thinking. Someone defined this journey with an expression that became popular – today we would say a trending topic: from myth to logos. Although it is a debatable expression, we will accept it, at least in the sense that each era of humanity has been over one of these conceptions of the world.

It is assumed that we are currently in the era of rational and logical thinking, and that teaching in our schools, institutes and universities should be based on it. However, there are many signs suggesting that, (not only) concerning to educational respects, we are rather following an inverse itinerary that increasingly returns us to the old world of magical thinking: the primacy of emotion over rationality, of the subjective over the objective, of the qualitative over the quantitative, the proliferation of teacher training courses that seem inspired by the ancient “science” of the Gnostics… Are we aware of the increasing number of believers in flat earthing? Could anyone really pretend this has nothing to do with the drift of education along the last decades?

Precisely because of its nature, scientific knowledge – since derived from rational thought – has a characteristic that is often forgotten and that differentiates it: its transmissibility; with a single limitation of intellectual order and degree: to understand the theory of relativity, no magical trait is needed to be revealed to the chosen one, nor any gift provided by some god or some demon, it is “only” necessary to know physics and everything that it entails. In other words, the gift of prophecy is not transmissible, but any individual is able to learn the theory of relativity… Theoreticaly, of course, since it would probabilly take most of us perhaps two hundred or more years to learn it, Einstein took much less time instead to discover it. This is the only limitation of scientific knowledge. Let’s say this way: an overwhelming majority of mortals would never have discovered the Pythagorean theorem by themselves, but once it has been explained to us, we can understand it as its own discoverer.

With magical knowledge, however, it doesn’t work this way. And magical knowledge – a more than probable oxymoron – is what New Age pedagogy is full of. That is why we wonder about this singular curricular subject called «Entrepreneurship», generally associated to economics subjects, which suggests to be something more than a mere advertising and seems to postulate an ideal or way of life. It should be understood that we are not questioning, far from it, the teachings of economics, but the epithet that biases them, the “merit” of whose implementation is the responsibility of the ineffable ex-minister Wert (2011-2015), also a pioneer of the picturesque introduction of bullfighting as a professional cycle of vocational education… Actually it really came from Catalonia, always a pioneer in pedagogical biases, but it seems that Wert, being himself an entrepreneur, appropriated it to take the glory.

To explain mathematics, you need to know mathematics. Not even the most delusional magical thinking can deny this; and since they don’t know, then let’s devalue maths i the curricual, or economics, never mind, because, as we all are supposed to know, maths are boring, difficult and, as a recent spanish secretary of state known by the nickname “Pam” proclaimed not too long ago, there is no need to teach mathematics[1], but sexuality, because she had never in her life needed to know what a square root is… Yes, I said “secretary of state”; we’d better let it go… Not even in a thousand years would such a genius come up with the theory of relativity! But let’s get back to entrepreneurship.

In short, it would be logical to think that if entrepreneurship is to be introduced into the curriculum, then it will be necessary for such a subject to be taught by someone who has to be, himself, an entrepreneur. In other words, we are not talking about someone who knows mathematics and teaches it, because the point is not anymore a question of “knowing”, but of “being”; otherwise it won’t work. A difference that is not trivial at all. And how should this be determined? And what if instead of an entrepreneur we get a scammer instead? We should be carefull about, because an entrepreneur can also be at the same time a scammer, and sometimes the difference between both categories may become quite subtle. Or what if the teacher comes to be a failed entrepreneur? Checking whether someone knows mathematics is relatively simple, you just need to know enough mathematics; but what about an entrepreneur? Was the “drug dealer” Pablo Escobar an entrepreneur? Or perhaps Thomas A. Edison, founder of lucrative companies, was more of an entrepreneur than Galileo, who only sought problems with the Inquisition? Why didn’t he continue making horoscopes by charging rich entrepreneurs and becoming rich himself? After all, was it that important if the Sun revolved around the Earth or the other way around? Did this discovery make him rich?

Because, let’s see then, could we say that Narciso Monturiol or Isaac Peral, inventors of the submarine, were not sufficiently enterprising? The first one, Monturiol, ended up ruined and in absolute poverty, they say due to his inability to do business; the other one, Peral, disgusted and a victim of what we would call mobbing today. Monturiol also invented a system for preserving meat that went unnoticed until an English “friend” of his stole it and patented it in London, making him a millionaire. Who was more enterprising of the two, the inventor or the thief? Who would we prefer as a teacher? What do we teach in “Entrepreneurship”? To steal other people’s inventions, or to plagiarize them as Edison did with Tesla, or Bell with Meucci?

Beyond the unknown moral reservations that the subject suggests with such a name, there is also another problem: what is intended to be transmitted with this subject? To instill character? Because entrepreneurship, and put in the best of cases, seems more like a question of personality, charisma or pathos, than a thematic and transmittable knowledge to be conveyed like those that used to be taught “traditionally”. Let’s be clear, a mathematician, a philosopher, a historian, an economist or an electrician, do not lose such condition by teaching their respective knowledges; on the contrary, an entrepreneur who teaches how to become enterprising, doesn’t look much such. This is the difference it has to be noticed.

But how can we transmit this entrepreneurial spirit? Because it is about “spirit” we are dealing witht, and about the spread of exemplarity as an ethical model. If it is about exemplarity, and to get out of the cul-de-sac, I may suggest a possible solution: if in the past times we had resorted to collections of saints’ lives for similar purposes – a certainly rather uncontagious and not transmisible characteristic, that of sanctity – I propose a new hagiographic collection under the generic title “Lives of entrepreneurs”. At the very least, students will read something, little more than self-help rubbish books, but it could be worse.

I can think of some names that, although not quite reliable in terms of exemplarity, would at least be fun. Always, of course, under the new motto: “from logos to scam”.

And if it turns out that the subject is not about this, then let them change the name and let’s stop with bullshit in education once and for all.

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYsGbCZdpJA

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons