Converts to Enterprise: Ideology in the Development of Entrepreneurship Education

• In Event: Adult education: practice, theory, and debate

Proposal

In the present, entrepreneurship education is a global paradigm. It is both an independent learning area and a value informing the purposes of education as a whole. Increasingly, “enterprising skills”, entrepreneurial attitudes, and related phenomena are moving towards the core of global education systems. Australian policy actors and education practitioners have eagerly embraced entrepreneurship education, framing it as important to economic growth, international competition, technological innovation, and emergent labour market demands. While significant research has been devoted towards enhancing the delivery of enterprise and entrepreneurship education in Australia and abroad, there has been little attempt to analyse its historical development. This paper aims to contribute to global understandings of entrepreneurship education by examining the historical development of the paradigm in Australia. Using grey literature from key organisations, historical policy documents and interviews, it finds that entrepreneurship education was imported to Australia in the 1970s by international networks of industry associations and lobby groups, private sector think tanks, and activist policymakers. These actors shared clear political and ideological intentions, hoping that entrepreneurial education would help to persuade the publics of the merits of private enterprise and free market economics. Their ideological intentions found a home in the form of ‘enterprise education’ during the 1990s, as entrepreneurship education became increasingly integrated into public curriculum documents and assessment frameworks. Intriguingly, official justifications for the paradigm that prevail in the present seem to have been invoked throughout its history, almost always lacking evidence to them, even as other actors were open about their ideological intentions for the tendency.

Author

• Sam Oldham, The University of Melbourne