Commentary
A few years ago, I was tasked with giving a 45-minute introduction on business and economics to several hundred high-school students. From my experience, there is no better teacher than experience itself. Otherwise for these kids trapped in desks for 12-16 years, my words would be just another lecture. So, I decided to draw on their personal experiences.
“How many of you have jobs apart from school that pay money?” I asked. From the entire auditorium full of kids, only a few hands went up in scattered places. My heart sank and I was stunned into silence. Nothing I said that day would really connect because it would be entirely abstract. I could not elaborate on the consumer-producer relationship, the role of marketing, the place of accounting, the functioning of markets. This is simply because the kids had no point of reference….