Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Should schools be teaching kids how to be entrepreneurs? If the brainy folks I listen to at conferences have the future right, yeah, the only people who will be gainfully employed outside of the top 20 or 25  percent of the populace will be artists and people who run their own companies. So we need to start training kids young on how to be entrepreneurs.And the best way to do that is via schools, either as part of the curriculum or as after-school programs. It’s already happening, as this piece I wrote on Teen Titans shows. It highlighted young people raising money for companies after going through after-school programs like Youth CITIES, in-school classes like NFTE, alternate approaches like NuVu Studio, and other efforts. I was focused on the Boston area, or I might have run across this 18-year-old associate at a venture capital firm.
I felt like I was writing about teenage sports or music prodigies, and perhaps I am. Most kids who pursue professions instead of academics don’t make a living at those professions, and I suspect that these young people will mostly not become tycoons. But then, most entrepreneurs fail at least once, so maybe starting young will work out in their favor.

WEB DuBois called the color line the problem of the 20th century, and I’ve been thinking lately about whether it was solved. That I could write this column, A white father afraid for his black sons, says yes, and no. Yes, because I’m too conventional to have crossed the color line to get married if race were still a major societal problem. No, because statistics on single parenthood, levels of income, education and incarceration, unemployment rates and access to capital all say that the problem of the color line remains, and may have worsened.

So is the color line the problem of the 21st century? I think the line has been partially erased, and that lessens the magnitude of the problem in some ways, but makes it worse in others. I may do more writing on this subject.