Business School

A few innovative teachers are teaching entreprenuership to their students, sometimes as early as the elementary level.

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Little is done to prepare kids for an economic world that offers none of the old guarantees. Now, a few innovative teachers -- a very few -- are changing that

Both of my stepsons are smart and do well in school, but to hear them talk about business you would think that the law of supply and demand had been repealed. Why such ignorance? Is basic economics too complicated for students? Or are teachers just bad at teaching it? -- C.H.

It was hard, listening to the rapid-fire discussion among the 26 assembled Delaware Valley retailers, not to be struck by just how savvy even the smallest small-business person can be, if given the chance.

They were a network of sole proprietors mostly, with a smattering of partnerships. All launched within the year, financed with pocket change or a small family investment, they'd been started with the same market surveys, cost graphs, and high hopes -- hopes that, for an unhappy few, had started to turn sour as days went by without any sales.

It was to those few chief executives in trouble that the rest now offered their expertise. Everyone in the network suggested a different solution. "You could lower your prices," Michael D'Amore of Michael's Magnets suggested."That makes demand go up." Meg Farrar proposed a premium, "like buy one, get one free" -- it had worked for her at Meg's Stashunary [sic]. "Or try advertising," a towheaded soprano, crayon in hand, called from the back. The discussion might have gone on all afternoon, with eager hands waving to catch the teacher's eye, if the school bell hadn't rung, signaling the end of the day.

Welcome to "Starville" -- known for most of the week as Mrs. Doris Stevenson's second-grade class at Brandywood School, in Wilmington, Del. -- proof that children can be taught how business and the economy work. Here, in a program called Mini-Society, children learn by creating a self-directed economic world that mirrors our own. Three times a week for 45 minutes, they become proprietors of small businesses, buying and selling refrigerator magnets or decorated cards, pencil holders or snacks. They create their own currency -- the "moonbeam" in Starville -- and make up their own rules for commerce. They rent desk space, keep a P&L, and set and pay taxes. Over the semester they see firsthand why people work, what happens in a store, and the difference between an owner and an employee. They learn what happens if you make a customer mad, how competition lowers prices and raises quality, and what makes you go bankrupt -- and how persistence and determination can help you start again. The children make the decisions, not the teacher, whose role is principally to "debrief" them on their experience; it is the students, after all, who live with the consequences, learning about cost-benefit analysis along the way.

Stevenson's students are lucky. Most American kids will go all the way through school without the vaguest clue as to what cost-benefit analysis is, let alone that it might have any possible importance in their lives. But at the end of the Mini-Society program, created by Marilyn Kourilsky, dean of teacher education at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and executive director of the California Council on Economic Education, elementary-school students test as well at recognizing economic terms and concepts as do college sophomores enrolled in Econ. 101. Their basic skills improve, too -- with moonbeams to keep track of, learning to add a column of figures takes on a new importance.

It's how the kids' attitudes are changed, however, that most impresses Stevenson, Delaware's 1986 teacher of the year. "Mini-Society ties children into the real world at an earlier age than ever before," she says. "By giving them real responsibility they learn to become good decision makers. And they learn that they can't have everything." At semester's end her students have more self-esteem and a stronger sense of autonomy, she adds; they're more creative and self-reliant, more courageous in the face of risk, and more aware of the trade-offs it involves.

Those are lessons that a growing number of their parents are learning from business as well -- lessons, sadly, that most American schoolchildren will never be taught. Not because they can't be, but because, except for a handful of innovators operating at the fringe, most educators are either unprepared or unwilling to teach them. Even the Mini-Society program, introduced in 1973, remains a tough sell, Kourilsky admits, its documented successes notwithstanding. It requires that teachers hand over classroom authority and the responsibility for learning to their students, a risk that few teachers will take; others dislike the program's clear market orientation or fear they themselves won't understand the economic terms involved.

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