Teaching for enterprise and the curriculum: Shaping the world faster than we can change

Abstract

Over the last few decades, the political agenda has been to gear education towards producing citizens who are capable of competing in an international marketplace.

One purpose of the New Zealand Curriculum Framework (1993) is to outline the ways in which the curriculum can balance "the interests of individual students and the requirements of society and the economy" (p. 1).

In the fullness of such a goal, students will need to demonstrate self-efficacy for enterprise.

In turn, teachers will need to value enterprise in their students, and to teach in ways that show that they believe they can impact on students' willingness and capability to be enterprising.

Is this the case in our schools? The evidence suggests, as Churchill put it, that "we are shaping the world faster than we can change ourselves, and we are applying to the present the habits of the past" (Walsh, 1993, p. 21).