I’ve been teaching entrepreneurship for more than 25 years. My degrees in English and law and my lifelong love of politics have provided a different perspective and a distinct pedagogy. I want students to understand the contributions entrepreneurship has made to American prosperity and the political structures that have made entrepreneurship possible.

Unfortunately, that’s not what’s typically taught. The standard way of approaching the subject matter is teaching students about innovation and how to start and run businesses.

For years, I’ve tried to make educators and administrators understand that we have been ignoring the single biggest threat to entrepreneurship, and that is the support for socialism that is being taught on our campuses and is spreading among the population.

For example, when I was asked in 2005 to create a cross-campus minor in entrepreneurship at the University of Illinois, I argued for a required course in entrepreneurship and public policy. The business professors shrugged: We don’t need that. That’s just a law class. We need to teach management and marketing and economics and finance.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. This wasn’t “just a law class.” And the traditional business curriculum already teaches those subjects very well. But learning how to start a business — especially in fields where the technologies are brand-new and virtually every aspect of the business model (What’s the product? Who’s the customer? Where’s the competition?) is uncertain — is completely different from running an established company with customers in defined markets and in identified industries.

What I saw was that the skills needed to start a completely new business are precisely those we should be using when implementing public policy: identifying a problem, proposing possible solutions and testing hypotheses using as little money as possible. In other words, find out what you’re wrong about early, fix the issues........

© Townhall