Don Advocates Review of Teaching of Entrepreneurship in Schools

James Sowole in Abeokuta

To achieve the desired objectives, a Professor of Sociology of Education at the Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), Ago Iwoye, Ogun State, Taiwo Edun, has advocated a review of teaching of entrepreneurship at all levels of education in the country.

The review, according to the don, should be done to focus more on self-discovery by the students to enable their talents match opportunities they will catch on in the environment.

Edun made the call while delivering the 101 Inaugural Lecture of the institution entitled: ‘Rethinking Education for Gainful Employment in Nigeria: A Sociological Imagination’.

The don said the current approach to teaching of entrepreneurship emphasises the cognitive domain to the determent of the affective psychomotor domains.

He noted that the current approach entails that students are introduced to the concepts and principles and are only expected to regurgitate them in the examination.

According to him, most of the teachers who teach these students too have never been entrepreneurs themselves.

The lecturer lamented that the current situation promotes teaching of entrepreneurship as a separate subject to the extent that students don’t see a link between their academic specialisation and entrepreneurship.

He said: “In order to close the gap between the labour market and tertiary institutions, I advocated the team-teaching approach in the handling of entrepreneurship such that practicing entrepreneurs will be invited to handle the practical aspects and serve as role models to the students.

“A form of internship should also be incorporated into the entrepreneurship curriculum so that the students can be immersed into the process within business firms.

“There should also be two legs to the teaching of entrepreneurship. The first leg should be the general introduction to the concepts, principles and skills while the second leg should be specific to the disciplines of the individual students.

“Employability should be conceptualised and promoted in its sense as traversing

the employees, self-employer and employee continuum, and should be given pride of place in the new curriculum.”

The don said the government should endeavour to make available the critical infrastructure, rejig fiscal and monetary policies and steadily improve the ease of doing business to enable entrepreneurship to thrive.

He added that the social investment schemes of the government should be expanded and graduated through proper funding and transparent management to guarantee livelihood for the majority of unemployed youths until such a time that the economy would open up enough to provide them with gainful employment.

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