Entrepreneurship Education and Pupils' Attitudes Towards Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is widely recognized as an engine of economic and social development. Initiating policies to increase peoples' propensity to become entrepreneurs is a key challenge for policymakers, and entrepreneurship education is considered important to create a culture for entrepreneurship. Over the past decades there has been a significant increase in the use of entrepreneurship education in schools, university colleges and universities in Europe. This chapter will focus on entrepreneurship education in upper secondary education and training. The main aim is to assess whether a European entrepreneurship programme promotes positive attitudes towards entrepreneurs among pupils. An investigation of pupils' attitudes towards entrepreneurs is important because these attitudes may also reflect how desirable they find the prospect of becoming an entrepreneur themselves as a future career choice (Kolvereid, 1996; Guerrero et al., 2008). It is also argued that the roots of an entrepreneurial career can be attributed to early phases of a person’s socialization, and that there is a positive correlation between entrepreneurial intentions at a young stage in life and entrepreneurial activity later on (Krueger et al., 2000; Aldrich, 2006).