Is Entrepreneurial Education the Solution to the Automation Revolution?

Abstract

Many fear a looming automation revolution will bring mass unemployment which will increase economic inequality and leave individuals without the work that provides their life meaning. In response policy makers, journalists and educators propose we teach some form of entrepreneurial education to create resilient, optimistic, creative, digitally fluent, risk-taking and problem-solving lifelong learners who can create or be employed doing meaningful, well-remunerated work that robots cannot do. However, whether promoted as STEM, lifelong learning or one of its other innumerable forms, this chapter argues that entrepreneurial education will not solve economic insecurity or help create more meaningful work . It instead consigns us to a world of scarcity, hierarchy and meaninglessness while threatening the lives of the marginalized individuals entrepreneurial education advocates most want to help. To avoid a precarious, inequitable future augmenting capital and its machines, educators must reject entrepreneurial education . In its place they must promote the pursuit and mastery of those activities and interests which students find meaningful and those which improve the civic skills and dispositions needed to imagine, deliberate and debate with others how to create a post-work world where all can be economically secure, engage in meaningful activities and participate in democratic governance.