Not Everything Has a Right Answer: What Entrepreneurship Education Really Teaches Students

What should school really teach students: how to find the right answers, or how not to feel lost when there is no clear answer? Can entrepreneurship education help young people make decisions with greater confidence, test their own ideas, and see mistakes as part of the learning process? Yuliia Batsura, Program Assistant at Platform for Social Change, explores these questions in her expert column.

Every year, as September 1 approaches, I catch myself thinking the same thing: no matter how many years have passed, this time of year still feels like the beginning of something new. Even when you are no longer a student, that feeling does not disappear. It simply changes — into a desire to start a new chapter, rethink something about yourself, and get ready for change.

This is also the time when I often think back to my own school years. Perhaps that is because today, a significant part of my work is connected to schools again, only from a very different perspective.

I work as a Program Assistant at Platform for Social Change and coordinate the Social Entrepreneurship Bootcamps programme, where we work with students and teachers. I also coordinate our Training for Trainers programme. Through this work, I have had many opportunities to observe how young people develop their own ideas, look for solutions, make mistakes, change their approach, and try again. And it has made me look differently at what school can — and perhaps should — really teach us.

We grew up with the idea of the “right answer.” There is a task, a set of conditions, an algorithm, and an answer that can — and often must — be checked against the answer key. Much of the education system was built around this logic: there is a clear path from the task to the result, and your job is to follow it as accurately as possible.

There was something reassuring about that. You knew where you were going and what counted as success.

The problem is that adult life does not come with an answer key.

You realise this fairly quickly. Sometimes you simply do not know where to begin. You do not fully understand what the problem is, where to go, or which questions to ask first. There is no ready-made algorithm, and no one can guarantee that the path you choose will be the right one.

You can do everything “by the book” and still get it wrong. Or you can take a risk, go against the advice you were given — and succeed.

Entrepreneurship education is not about turning everyone into an entrepreneur

This is why modern schools are increasingly focused not only on helping students acquire knowledge, but also on teaching them how to apply it in real situations and find their own solutions. What matters is no longer just how many facts a student can remember, but what they can do with that knowledge when circumstances change, when there is no ready-made template, and when a decision still has to be made.

This is where entrepreneurship education can offer much more than it might seem at first.

Its purpose is not to make sure every student starts a business after leaving school. Nor is it simply about teaching children how to make money — although, I have to admit, this is still how entrepreneurship education is often perceived.

For me, it is about something much broader.

It is about noticing a problem and choosing not to walk past it, even when that would be easier. Asking a question even when it feels uncomfortable. Putting forward your own idea and not being afraid to test it in practice. Getting a disappointing result and treating it not as a disaster, but as useful information: alright, this did not work — what can we do differently?

And sometimes it means honestly admitting that your first solution was not the best one and changing it instead of holding on to it simply because it was yours.

This becomes especially clear when students are working not on an abstract task from a textbook, but on a problem they have chosen themselves. In that situation, you cannot simply flip through a few pages and find the answer at the end of the chapter.

You have to reach an agreement as a team. Understand who you are actually creating the solution for. Talk to people. Check whether anyone really needs it. Build something. Look at the result.

And be prepared for that result to be completely different from what you expected.

We saw this clearly during our Social Entrepreneurship Bootcamps. Students came in with ideas that seemed very strong at the beginning, only to change them several times as they worked on them. Some started with one product and later realised that the real problem they needed to solve was something completely different. Others changed their approach after their first attempts because the feedback they received from potential users was not what they had expected.

To me, these were not failed projects. Quite the opposite. This was the learning process itself.

From “Did we do it right?” to “What can we test?”

Of course, entrepreneurship education includes plenty of things that can be taught very concretely. There is finance, marketing, customer relations, planning, and communication. These are areas of knowledge that do not need to be invented as you go.

The difference is that this knowledge stops being the end goal. Instead, it becomes a set of tools that students can use to solve real problems.

And gradually, even the questions begin to change.

Instead of asking, “Did we do it right?”, students begin to ask: “What do we need to find out now?”, “How can we test this?”, “Why didn’t it work?”, “What should we change?”

At some point, you notice that a student is no longer simply completing an assignment. They are beginning to take responsibility for their own decisions.

This is where an entrepreneurial mindset goes far beyond entrepreneurship itself. It can be applied to learning, future careers, teamwork, and many other situations where the goal is not to reproduce a ready-made algorithm, but to understand the problem, try different approaches, and be able to explain why you chose a particular solution.

There is something else I find especially valuable.

When students work on their own projects, they naturally try out different roles. Someone takes responsibility for finances. Someone else is better at communication. Another person focuses on the product and users’ needs. And someone suddenly discovers that they actually enjoy presenting the team’s work in front of an audience.

Sometimes this kind of experience is enough to make a young person look at themselves more closely for the first time: What am I good at? What genuinely interests me? What would I like to develop further?

To me, this is one of the greatest values of this kind of learning. Students are given space not only to learn something, but also to discover themselves. And they get to do it while they are still at school — in an environment where making a mistake should not come at too high a cost.

If we want students to find their own answers, we need to support teachers

There is one important condition, however. If we want this approach to exist beyond individual projects or bootcamps, working with students alone is not enough. We also need to support teachers.

It is much easier to talk about students becoming more independent than it is to create a classroom where they can genuinely be independent.

For this, teachers need not only freedom, but also practical tools and an understanding of how to guide students when they themselves do not have a predetermined “right answer.” It is a somewhat different role for a teacher. And teachers, too, need the opportunity to try it, test different approaches, make mistakes, and gradually build their own experience.

That is why one of our next steps at Platform for Social Change will be a dedicated professional development course for teachers.

And I want to be clear from the beginning about what this course will not be.

It will not be an attempt to teach teachers how to “become entrepreneurs.” Nor will it be another theoretical course to complete simply for the sake of ticking a box.

We want to give teachers practical, useful tools — things they can take into the classroom on Monday morning and use to work more confidently with entrepreneurship topics, student projects, and young people’s ideas, without constantly feeling as though they are improvising in the dark.

I also think it is important for teachers not to be afraid to say: “I don’t know what the answer will be, but we can find out together.” Because if we want young people to become comfortable with uncertainty, the adults around them need to know how to work with it too.

School cannot prepare a child for every specific situation they will face in adult life. In my view, that is simply impossible.

Life will always be more complicated and unpredictable than any curriculum. No course can list every possible scenario that an individual person will encounter.

But school can teach something else: how not to feel lost or freeze when there simply is no ready-made answer.

And, to be honest, I wish someone had taught me that when I was at school.

Yuliia Batsura
Program Assistant, Platform for Social Change