"Learning in the Market" :

Learning in the Market

Learning in the market means learning amidst insecurity. In every business decision, a risk is inherent. With a wrong decision, economic sanctions will sooner or later come into effect. Good decisions lead ultimately to higher takings. Entrepreneurship is a serious game.

The market is like a school without a schoolhouse, which sometimes manifests itself as an obstacle course, a complex labyrinth, sometimes as a place for lightening-quick decisions, a workshop for tinkerers and inventors, an Ashram for the reception of otherworldly inspiration, an office for unusual measures, a stock exchange of ideas, a show-ground; it allows input from school-less teachers in various roles: as competing entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, managers, business partners, inventors, customers, enemies and friends. The teaching and learning materials stem from reality and are often home-made. This school, having next to nothing in common with the institution of the same name run by educators, finances itself.

Oh yes, and neither are there grades – the customers express their approval or displeasure in Euros and Cents. Exams are no longer short-term events with dubiously little long-term value: the consumers continue to spread their praise or their aspersion. The consumers force entrepreneurs to keep on learning, to constantly gain new competences in their field and produce new ideas. If they take the first early warning signals seriously enough, producers usually have enough time to readjust to the increased or changed demands of their customers before failing to meet the class target – ending with a balanced account sheet. Repeating the grade does happen when entrepreneurs pay too little attention to the market or get out of their depths, but there are no permanent expulsions from this school – new beginnings are also possible. And no one who's there as an entrepreneur needs to be motivated because they're motivated already, and the more fascinated they are by the game, the less they worry about timetables and vacation, they want to be there day and night.

1. The Failure of the Educational Profession

The market as a school is a dream which only occurs in life after school. In normal, 'schoolish' schools, the children are protected by their educators, and aren't allowed to play games that have a serious nature. Teachers are no entrepreneurs. On the contrary: they belong to the institutional species. If they were unlucky enough to be born, let's say, in Berlin-Neukölln, they probably landed in an all-day nursery at the tender age of a few weeks, transferred to an all-day kindergarten group for 3- to 4-year-olds, and then the preschool group for five-year-olds, followed by all-day primary school, all-day middle school and all-day high school; after all this, they can go on to university to train as – school was apparently so homely that they can't imagine anything else – a teacher, in order to stay forever young. From here, they go straight into teaching practice and back to school. No one threw these students out in time. Even if they hadn't attended the nursery or kindergarten, they could urgently have done, at some point or other, with a rest from the long march through educational institutions, even if just for a while. The occasional trip to Lanzarote or the Engadin does not suffice.

Do teachers show children how to become young entrepreneurs? Do they support the obsessive passion, the stubborn pursuit of unusual ideas, the calculation of risks? No, they do not. The basic qualification of entrepreneurship is domesticated by educators and transformed into the ability to exist as an employee, thus producing illiteracy in all things entrepreneurial and thereby an educational catastrophe with dire consequences. Even the design of their institutions is a counter-productive model: schools run up costs without having the chance to earn.

Across the globe, the majority of schools favor repetitive learning in fake security: the teachers are familiar with exercises and solutions, which pupils study with ever-decreasing interest, trudging along the well-worn paths that their teachers have trodden before them. The complexities of reality are reduced down for didactic purposes, assigned to subjects and distorted almost beyond recognition into adages such as 'if five workers take ten days to build a small house, how much time do 500 workers take'?

Decades ago, in his essay "Sysiphos, or the boundaries of education", Siegfried Bernfeld wrote: "The school – as an institution – teaches. It is at least one of the teachers of the generation; one of those teachers, who – making a mockery of all the lessons given by teachers, great and small, of all the teaching programs and conferences, decrees, sermons – makes each generation what it is today, what it is again and again, and what it should definitely not be after all the demands and promises… …and that is the ludicrousness of the teaching situation. With all the thinking, writing, experimenting and diligent campaigning in the world, the teaching profession cannot see that all of this is pointless because it is happening in the wrong place. Meanwhile – and this is what is so objectionable – it maintains the status quo by diverting all the attention away from the enemy through all this distraction and activity elsewhere. All these hours of work in vain. No, not in vain. It serves the to preserve the status quo."

Subject-based learning (as opposed to situation- and problem-oriented learning), in individual competition and inside the parameters of would-be security, is relatively non-transferable. The difficulties of reality take their own course, and overcoming them often requires teamwork, and the inventive process of inquiry learning where theory and practice are intimately connected. Pupils whose horizons stretch only as far as the next piece of homework, for whom learning is disconnected from their own social (and economic) context, whose motivation to develop their own initiative dwindles, experience an education which prepares them only for work in dependency.

Many educators are frightened by entrepreneurs: they are something from beyond the grave. When they read the newspaper, they skip the economy section; their general knowledge ends at the feature pages. Instead of supporting better businesspeople and applying the discussion of values to concrete economic projects, an anthropology of the businessperson is assumed, stemming historically – at least in part – from antisemitism and based on presuppositions such as that businesspeople are the product of flaws in biography or character, and certainly not of educational success. When entrepreneurs emerge by accident, this is beyond the bounds of educational responsibility. Although educators like to be highly paid, German teachers earning the second highest teaching salaries worldwide, they regard the earning of profit as rather indecent; getting really rich even more so. They don't like competition either – imagine the uproar amongst German educators if they earned according to a ranking system.

Entrepreneurship education doesn't take place at university either. Business Administration Faculties pretty much ignores entrepreneurship. Students of Business Education have difficulties explaining entrepreneurial initiatives later on because they have already become strangers to risk through their choice of studies. If universities really wanted to support high quality business initiatives, they would need to lose much of their bureaucratic superstructures and arranged marriages of high-school teachers in scientific institutions, and become productive, competitive, administratively and economically nigh-on independent units: universities as – amongst other things! – a collection of intelligent businesses doing science, living from an ingenuity supported by science, in which both professors and students learn to take risks. University as a volcano which constantly erupts with new, visionary ideas? University as a collection of the entrepreneurial Avant-garde, professors who finance at least part of their post themselves, students who instead of becoming eternal youths, start up the subsidiaries of their Alma Mater? Aha, far-fetched? Probably.

A little flashback which is more connected to reality: a conference room in the Free University of Berlin, about a year after the Reunification of Germany. Professors from East and West sit opposite one another. Outside, the landscape is already being shaken by earthquakes – collapsing companies fire their workforces, tenants fear financial strangulation by the former owners, the spending sprees are followed by the hangover of high repayments – but what are the gentlemen doing in there? They are talking about the problems of artistic motivation in class. Some of the colleagues are on the case of such meaningful questions as whether in the future one will be able to say in English "I will" instead of "I shall", and whether storage represents an application-oriented subject within the field of IT, or if one can carry out a quality control in chemistry on the subject of Neutralization.

Learning in real situations easily ruptures rules and rituals. During a public event at the Bielefeld Upper School Campus, a leading island of reform in an otherwise dreary educational landscape, there was talk of state schools also being schools in the state and that they should get involved in what's going on outside. When someone proposed that the staff should get involved in the campaign against the building of a sports plane airport in a nearby marshland, a teacher of social/political studies protested that the campaign would surely exceed his workload. Exactly! And when, later on in the discussion, an art teacher complained that his plan to paint a fountain in Bielefeld with his class had met with local-political rancor and bureaucratic entanglements, others in the audience say "So what?". The children learned other important things: that decisions aren't just made in the meetings of the responsible committees, but also in corridors, in telephone conversations, on the way home from bartering sessions verging on political obscurity. Maybe the pupils had learned something about administrative inefficiency and how it could be done better. Lessons about local politics instead of art? That might be what happens when the school wants to become part of the state.

For children who want to do business, now or later, school acts like a giant cheese grater: you can only develop a business idea in spite of it or even in defiance of it. For teachers, though, school is like a magnet which constantly threatens to pull them back in and end each foray they make into the world outside the school gates. For all teachers? No, even amongst teachers there are some socially-minded entrepreneurs. Those who want to connect school with life, who favor open lessons, involve their children in projects that have a serious character, want to reestablish the connection between school and neighborhood; teachers who base the learning processes and experiences also on key economic problems and situations – it is they who need support.

2. Emergency Education

It is night in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, where the Favelas are and Black prevails. The Movimento Negro, the Afro-Brazilian movement, has sent out an invitation to an exercise. The aim is to encourage the bandits (who go about their handy work whether the Movimento Negro like it or not) to more humane hold-ups. Fourteen- to twenty-year-olds have got lined up ready, a bit like the descendants of the robber Lampiâo and his band, the Cangaçeiros, who used to spread unease in Sertâo, the dry northeast of the big country, many years ago. The Maria Bonitas are also there tonight, the girlfriends who enjoy witnessing lessons such as these. Bandits shoot fast, often out of fear. They usually shoot when tourists move too fast, like when they reach too quickly into their bum-bags and the bandits don't know whether they're getting out their money or a pistol. So what they need is to loosen up the situation, to tell the tourists to please in a relaxed way, in the here and now, slowly and with no erratic movements, get out their money, best of all from the front pocket of their shirt, but when they have it in their bum-bag round the back, then please turn round slowly with hands up, so that they only reach into their bum-bag while the robber is looking on. But what if it's complicated to get the money out of stingy tourists? What about if it's stashed away in their shoe or a hidden pocket somewhere? How can a bandit, under stress himself and not particularly good in English, communicate his message in a precise but at the same time relaxing way to his shocked victim? How fast – no matter how slow the movements – does the whole thing have to take place?

The night sees a lot of smirking. The aim wasn't to stop the bandits from attacking people – it wouldn't be at all realistic, the conditions are just too bad – or to encourage them to become entrepreneurs and start making an income (for which, though we might prefer it, there is not enough time), but rather to decrease the death toll. In another city, Sâo Paulo, a German development worker convinced a young bandit to take up work pushing wheelbarrows of cement on a building site. Three weeks later he was back on the street, and when she asked him what he really wants to be, if he's already done with the wheelbarrow job, his answer was "a big game hunter in Africa". This answer holds an important tip for educationalists: you can't replace an adventurous life with dreary pedagogy. It must be an education which doesn't cause the clientèle to either nod off or to get the hell on out.

Staging a show of boredom is directly opposed to emergency education. In cases of emergency, adventure is a familiar element. There is no didactic filter between the learner and reality, and those doing the teaching learn alongside their clientèle, expose themselves to real situations and run projects which have a point. This doesn't mean that learning in the market happens without protection though. A protective framework is necessary for entrepreneurial projects, because a collapse can be more dramatic than simply slipping down a grade. The protection just needs to come, unlike in school, at the right place.

At the beginning of the 1980s, the Hermann Lietz School on the German island of Spiekeroog – a comprehensive school founded in the 1920s – was on the brink of collapse. In recent years, amid ever-decreasing motivation among teachers, parents had preferred to send their children to boarding schools and the islanders held the school behind the dunes in less esteem than ever. The school founder's motto "Living and Working" had been fully forgotten until a new school director, Hartwig Henke, arrived on the scene and saw the school's financial difficulties as an educational opportunity. "Living and working" now meant surviving. The school needed to act entrepreneurially, and the pupils were suddenly important because the fate of the sinking ship depended on them. What a beacon of opportunity on the German educational landscape! Survival meant using idle wasteland around the school and enriching the lunchtime menu with nutritious vegetables, building up a farm with sheep and highlands cows, repairing the dikes, protecting the school from storm and flood, using the wind as a source of energy, and finding out whether it is profitable to collect the trash (not just from the school but from the whole island) and take it to a recycling scheme.

After the first trials, the pupils suggest turning the school (which is already registered as a limited company) into several small firms, turning classes into small businesses, ransacking the curriculum for useful material for their projects. Homework would take on a totally new meaning: for example, how can you use solar energy to optimize the relationship between the angle of tilt on the roofs of the greenhouses and the position of the sun? Or find out why the wind turbines built by large companies (which must obviously be run by landlubbers) corrode so quickly in salty sea air, and which materials prove to be more resistant?

Entrepreneurial ideas are vented: since driving is forbidden on the island, we could design solar-driven vehicles. Or pushcarts with rollers and caterpillar tracks for families on vacation who sink into the sand with the little wheels on their pushchairs. The school could open a café for walkers who are hungry and thirsty after roaming the mudflats.

And the teachers? They could be shareholders or business managers of the classroom-firms and share the profits with the pupils, the pupils suggest. The old subjects should still exist, but in reduced form. The really important knowledge can be learned in the small firms outside of the 50-minute rhythm of the regular classes: that's where the real learning begins. If you want to manage a couple of hectares of agriculture under glass roofs instead of digging up frozen vegetables in the winter, then even the planning stages require a sound knowledge of economics, geography, biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics; you have to do market analyses, research customer behavior, calculate probability sums, factor in climate and water, examine soil conditions, and become acquainted with the growing of vegetables that don't only look good but also, most importantly, taste good and are full of nutrients.

Curriculum commissions are not all-knowing. The curriculum doesn't tell you how to prepare the best ground in the conditions at Spiekeroog, ground which isn't just rich in nutrients but also holds water for long enough because of the added lime. But the islanders know. With their help and their expertise in the field, the projects should be able to avoid failure.

Thought up, discussed, proposed, and often carried out as well. Teachers and pupils, in conjunction with the commune of Spiekeroog, set up an Education and Information Centre in the Lower Saxon Wadden Sea National Park, and receive over 12,000 visitors in a year. They built a solar power station to produce usable water for 100 people and worked with the commune again on a larger wind power station which could produce not just 20 kilowatts like the previous one, but 200 to 300. A pupil shop opened but had to close again because of parasites in their own ranks. A small museum brought in 5000 Euros in its first year. The café for hikers now exists, with its profit and loss account. These days, the Hermann Lietz School on Spiekeroog is long since out of deep waters. It has a future, and the islanders are proud of it once again.

Ultimately, it's not so much the pupils who have difficulties with the economy as the teachers. Few of them want to be shareholders or managers of little satellite companies around the school. Some dream of the good old life back at the grammar school, the status of civil servant. And when a pupil noticed a little gap in the market on the island, which has many bicycles but nowhere that repairs them, and set up a private workshop to which people began bringing their broken bicycles, and business flourished and the pupil began to earn more and more, some of the teachers turned up and banned the business, deeming this way of earning money for himself unacceptable.

If educators aren't entrepreneurs or don't want to be, if would be a great help if they at least allowed children and young people who have a passion they want to follow to do their own thing without constantly bothering them. Or as Ivan Illich says, "Most learning is not the result of lessons. It is more the result of unhindered participation in a relevant environment."

3. Understanding the Children of the Poor as Entrepreneurs

Brazil, Minas Gerais Province, in May 1987: As part of a conference in Belo Horizonte, a group of Latin American educationalists set off in rickety cars towards Betim. Over the next hour, the road leads them to the flipside of wealth. They stop in Bairro Santa Lucia in front of the Salâo do Encontro Artesanato, a "school" which – thank heavens – is no longer recognizable as such. The education specialists know: Brazilian primary schools have a dropout rate of eighty percent in the first four years. Children from the Favelas often come to school simply to collect the school meal in order to share it with their family.

The educationalists are shown around the Salâo for two hours before driving back to their conference. Some turn up their noses at what they have seen, regarding it not as an Escola Comunitara Produtiva, but rather as a business based on the work of both children and adults, and owing its economic success to the fact that the salaries are so low. As the conference comes to an end, other educationalists demand funding from Europe for their projects, arguing that Europe bears a historical responsibility for Latin America, and should be treated like a cow ready for milking.

The Salâo seems to have two sides. We can see it in this way, but – as in Akira Kurosawa's Film "Rashomon", we can also see it in a completely different way. For us, the story unfolds as follows: in the middle of the 1970s, the teacher Noemi Gontijo left her job at an old-style school. Along with a few poor neighbors and their children, she set up some workshops and began to hand-produce and sell carpets and wall-hangings. Later, furniture was added to the production line. And since Noemi knew what the wealthy inhabitants of Minas Gerais have a fancy for – rustic pomp for their villas – and what they were willing to pay, her people got their hands on railway sleepers, millstones, cattle harnesses, wagon wheels, tow bars and heavy iron chains – everything you need to install countryside kitsch. Since then, they build home bars: bar fortresses, piled up high and with overhanging flanks decorated with spokes and chains - bars which can be placed in the middle of large rooms. At first sight, they resemble the disemboweled mechanics of a windmill, but if you take a second look, you catch sight of the bottle- and glass-holders, the flat counters and built-in seats. These bars are a major success, and with them, all the real artwork that the company produces: carpets in natural colors, wall-hangings in unique, expansive, fantastical patterns.

From a small initiative, a middle-sized one has emerged, both philanthropic and highly professional. Three hundred and fifty people between the age of eleven and nineteen work there, and another 1000 neighbors can eat there twice a day for free. The customers can expect a waiting time of four months, and everyone who comes to collect their product knows that they will first be sent for an hour-long tour of the company in order to talk to the artists – old and young – about how their ideas for the design and production came into being.

There are no professional teachers in this school: everyone is both teacher and pupil. The fourteen-year-old teaches the eleven-year-old to read and write, who in turn shows the three-year-old in the company nursery how to handle hemp and bast. A nineteen-year-old acts as accountant, and despite having no formal knowledge of accountancy, he has developed his own personal, sophisticated visual theory of calculation and accounting. The wooden walls of his office are plastered with giant tables and ciphers which allow him an overview of the entire production process and the names of all those who are involved; like this, he can find out who is producing what and how long it will take. The warehouse manager is also a layman, having likewise used the principle of trial and error to develop logistics which now run smoothly. No one in the workshops stays empty-handed when they need a refill of wool, paint or railway buffers.

One of the rules of the company is that each part of the whole sustains itself so that it does not become dependent on subsidies. This applies to the nursery as well. Here, without a trace of the brutality of the child labor in 19th Century European factories, the children weave small carpets and tapestries on little looms. These looms were built for them by the older children, just like the little pottery wheels they use to make children's crockery. From production techniques to price calculation, the children learn everything that is necessary to run the business. The adults have bought a circus tent, and the children work alongside trainers to put together a program which they then give paid performances at schools in the region. At the edge of the street there is a disused railway carriage which they use to sell their products. The numerous visitors who are on the lookout for chairs, tables, beds, cushions, tapestries or ceramics which match the bars on display in the Salâo, buy what the children have to offer: they are instant souvenirs without the need for a waiting list.

The Philippines, Luzon Province, in October 1987: The village is called Cardona and is situated at the edge of the shallow Lake Laguna, not far away from Manila. At the lake, illegal large-scale land holdings have become increasingly common. The rich have erected dense bamboo fences around hectare upon hectare of the lake and breed fish there. The lake resembles a honeycomb. Watchtowers with armed security guards mark out the borders between one person's property rights and the next. The small-scale fishermen of Cardona are left with less and less of the lake for fishing, their catch no longer enough to survive on.

Purita, a teacher, is beset with the idea of starting a school in Cardona which can generate enough income for both the children and herself to live from. Not by catching fish, but by rearing ducks and pigs. These sell well on the market. The children and fishermen should learn not to be dependent on the lake anymore, as it becomes more and more out-of-bounds, but rather to use the land.

As teacher, Purita knows that she has to throw her colonial educational ideas overboard. Despite the task being relatively clear, the solutions are far from being so. The lack of capital – the pesos they have scraped together are just enough to buy a pig – must be compensated for by additional knowledge. She and the children need to become local experts in the rearing of pigs and ducks. They have to ask farmers and vets, read books (which go nowhere near explaining everything there is to know about pigs and ducks) and observe the animals, and learn how to make calculations which are based on more than just wishful thinking.

The contours of the pig and duck rearing school of Cardona are becoming clearer. Everything becomes part of the curriculum: building the school and the pens, market analysis, looking after the animals, marketing, investment policy, calculation and accountancy, organization of work and of their own administration structures. Elementary cultivation techniques can be learned within the production framework. Writing diaries about pigs makes more sense when it has a direct effect on the well-being of the animals and on the overall financial situation. The old subjects are no longer meaningful, at least not in terms of how they offer up their contents. The new subjects, says the teacher, are oriented towards the key problems of breeding. The new subjects have names such as "How to make pigs happy", since – according to the children's theory – happy pigs have lots of piglets, and when they are big, they have even more babies. Hence the need to learn everything there is to know about the psychology of pigs, to observe them up close and see that they are like you or me, sometimes jealous, sometimes in a bad mood or up to tricks, definitely sensitive things.

Another subject, "How to make the most cost-efficient food chains" takes the pupils on the hunt for water hyacinths that grow as weeds which form little fields on the lake, in the grey-zone this side of the bamboo fences. "Water hyacinths", says one neighbour, "can be dried and fed to the pigs". The result of the experiment: the dried fibres turn out to contain no nutritional value. But the ducks? There is a fish, like in Thailand, that regards the excrement of ducks as a delicacy. And there are snails that are partial to the excrement of fish. And ducks, in turn, like to eat snails. Homework: how many ducks can swim in one pond if enough oxygen is to remain below the surface of the water so that the fish do not suffocate from the ducks' excrement? How many fish are needed for how many snails, and how many snails for how many ducks? Where do they come from, and under which conditions do they reproduce? Can research-based learning of this kind make do with the insights of the Philippine national curriculum? Never in a million years? Exactly.

Nothing goes according to plan in plain old reality. The vision on the horizon can disappear in a puff of smoke. Pigs can be carried off by disease, snails can be swallowed up by the mud after the next typhoon, never to be seen again. It may be true that happy pigs have a lot of offspring, but the question is whether the children can wait that long without starving themselves. Who can teach them to minimize unproductive time, and to produce and sell peanut butter while the pigs are pregnant? Who can protect them from the false hope of quick profit, who can lend them the stamina, or explain to them that they have no option other than serving their communal undertaking day and night like poor fools, that a concept of self-reliance economics cannot rest on the laurels of the initial idea and wave of enthusiasm alone, but rather has to be made reality step by step, pebble by pebble?

A few months later, the little school in Cardona gives up the ghost. The single pig - albeit happy, pregnant and soon to give birth – couldn't stand up to the economic pressure, not even with the help of its offspring. When the piglets were fat enough, each child took one home with satisfaction and felt that the school had fulfilled its purpose.

Developing productive Community Schools is like building a flying machine and learning to fly. With a lack of skill, robustness or ascending current, those involved suffer a fate like that of Berlinger, the tailor of Ulm. It may be a steep descent, but the crash is usually bearable, because one either lands like Berlinger did, on the water of the Danube, or like the children of Cardona, in the informal sector from which they came.

Making the children of the poor into entrepreneurs? They already are. Supporting them is more about working on the economic ideas, allowing them to gain an overview and to find ways out of the informal sector into the regular sector, to the places where there is more money: not a business run by poor for the poor, but rather one which aims to harness the buying power of the whole market.

Poor children can't afford a childhood. Millions of them live on the streets, support themselves and sleep in doorways or under bushes. They work for themselves or illegally in factories. They know how to deal with corrupt police officers and how to ensnare customers. They help each other out and pay protection money. They form gangs and go on the hunt for bounty. They practice their own version of justice and have pity. They develop their own playthings. They sell bananas and drugs, newspapers and chiclets, they harvest cotton, clean shoes and carry stones. Their life is full of risks; they can be eaten alive by parasites, beaten up or starve. At the same time, it is full of adventure, better than the bleak hut that cannot offer them a home or the grim prison of aid. The children of the Third World have more abilities than the children of imaginary childhood.

The story of the street children of Manila reminds us more of the successful glider flight of Otto Lilienthal than of the tailor of Ulm; they took it upon themselves to set up a restaurant in the red light district of Manila, Ermita. It is a story in several chapters, and still has an open ending.

We find ourselves – in September 1986 – in the Mabini Street: arrival of the customers, just after 6pm. Jeepneys and taxis bring the stream of people who have come from afar. They are the consumers, the pedophiles, homosexuals and sex tourists who have made Manila into a second Mecca, to be topped only by Bangkok. Since years ago, when Francis Ford Coppola filmed "Apocalypse Now" somewhere out in the jungle over a period of years on end, the pedophiles among his staff have been using the villages in that region for their own devices and turning the children there into prostitutes. Today, several thousand children live on the streets of Metro Manila, many of them living from prostitution.

Commotion: a husband grabs his wife, who is hustling on the streets. Bars, drinking booths, girls, visitors, children. We wander along the street with Victor, a social worker, and wait to be approached. One boy, Diego, greets Victor – they know one another. Diego's job is not in prostitution, but to help the customers who arrive in cars; in return for watching out for their cars he earns 50 centavos. Like the prostitute boys, he sleeps on the streets.

He goes to get Ronny, a second boy. "My visitor is coming in a moment" says Ronny, "he's going to wait for me on the other side of the street". Opposite is a fast-food place, a marketplace for the buying and selling of love. We talk about the customers. "Mine" says Ronny "wants to take me to France. He's already been to my family and given them money. He wants to send me to school." Hope? Or just a load of hot air from the customer?

When are the good times, when are the bad times? "At the weekend it's rush hour here". That's a good time, it brings in money, much of which goes to their families. The bad times are not just at the beginning of the week, but also when the gangs of older children demand too much protection money from the younger ones. What do they want to be when they're older and the visitors don't want them any more? "Engineer" says one. "Work in an office" says another. Office: executive management, a Mercedes with onboard phone and lots of money. How will they make it? "Well..." says Diego, "maybe by going back to school".

Diego is like Huckleberry Finn: dirty, foolhardy, a worker. Ronny is a dreamer, looks charming, is cleanly dressed. Both are twelve years old. The others who join us later also call themselves workers or prostitutes. "There's my friend" calls Ronny, and we tell him to go over and fetch him, we'd like to talk to him. Ronny goes. We doubt that the customer will risk coming over, but he does. "What do you want?" he asks, "are you from the police or journalists?". We assure him that we are neither. He, Pierre, is from Lyon, a lanky man in his mid-thirties, academic qualifications, own company, travels a lot. "Manila is my dream, the boys here are the best". "You want to take your boy to France?". Pierre turns to Ronny and hisses at him: "You talk too much". We tell him we don't care whether he takes him to Lyon or not, no need to get worked up.

We tell Pierre that the boys want to go back to school and become engineers or suchlike, since in a couple of years pedophiles won't be interested in them anyway. Pierre laughs: "They wouldn't go. Ermita is their school, life is their school. It's more exciting here than going to classes". We insist: all this sounds great but nonetheless, pedophiles are pedophiles and boys grow up. And that unlike their rich clients, the boys won't have many opportunities if they don't learn anything else. School doesn't necessarily have to be as dreary as it was back in Lyon. Question: "How would you run a school, if you were its director?" Pierre refuses to answer the question, but does go on to talk to Victor, the boys and us for an hour about this other kind of school in Ermita, the school that prepares its pupils for the time "after". Pierre thinks it should have flexible hours: because if he, the customer, wants to fetch his boys to bed in the morning, that has got to be possible. "Yes, and don't ever make school be on Friday and Saturday" says Diego, "the beginning of the week is better". So a Monday and Tuesday school, one with open planning, one which connects with the abilities of the children; a school in which they can make money as well as learning something new. The concept of the Productive Community School in the red light district of Manila is taking on its first, still unclear contours.

October 1987: Kojak is the bald-headed top-dog of the district: Chinese, executive, a kind of local mayor. It is late evening in Ermita. We say we would like to organize an event with the children from the street. "How many do you need? Boys or girls?" We explain to Kojak that we're not planning a sex party, and that we're asking him not as middle man, but as Barangay captain. We want to do a workshop about the time after. After all, he is also of the opinion that the children should go somewhere in life when they're older. We need his protection and his knowledge. Nothing would change for him economically: the protection fee would still be paid, and if the kids earned more, could maybe even be increased. Kojak blinks and says nothing. We're sitting on chairs next to the Blue Hawaii with beer bottles in our hands. Opposite, a tourist is leaving the Thriller with Sally Diaz on his arm: he gave 75 pesos to the Mamasan inside and should give Sally another 75. The district police will get some of the takings, and the hotel staff, Kojak and his friends will surely get a share of it too.

The Mamasan in Pips next door is excited by the idea. Her go-go dancers Theresa de la Cruz and Emmy Solajes want to speak at the workshop. Outside, in front of the bar, children are begging with sleeping babies on their arms. "Boss", says one boy, "I'll look after your car". Kojak has drunk half of his beer. He's in, he says.

At around three in the morning, children on the square next to the well-frequented restaurant Aristocrat are talking about how they'll tell other children about the workshop and bring them along. Some of them do cartwheels and somersaults. They can all sing and dance, they say. They are standing in front of the restaurant and selling flowers or offering - "do you want a nice girl?" - their older sister.

A few days later on a hot afternoon. Next to the Ermita church there is space for benches and chairs, a microphone and speaker's stand. Street children and prostitutes, the priest, Kojak, social workers, pimps and police officers – many people have come to collect ideas for the school for the time after.

It is the moment when the idea of the street children restaurant is born: school as a restaurant full of life. The clients come from far away to seek adventure, say the children. So we have to offer them something adventurous. Eating as an experience, an event: in the Canadian corner of the restaurant, perhaps a camp fire would be burning, where you can fry your own steak. Hungry people could wind their own spaghetti through a pasta machine. Sitting on Korean mats you would smell the scent of sizzling Bulgogi. Yes, and in the Filipino part you could fish your own fish and lobsters out of the pool, with a huge choice. The Philippines have lots and lots of islands, and they're cooked differently in each place.

Next to the restaurant, say the people taking part, there should be an acrobatics school, and in the restaurant a stage. Here, the children can perform acrobatics, dance, sing and act. The East Side story, the Soap and Jeepney Opera, with Diego, Ronny, Sally, Theresa, Emmy and Kojak in the main roles and the customers in the supporting roles?

November 1987: The German Society for Technical Cooperation (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, GTZ) in Eschborn receives an application for funding for Productive Community Schools in the Philippines. According to the application, these schools will educate entrepreneurs from the bottom up, entrepreneurs with sociological imagination and economic knowledge. Productive Community Schools would act as an intelligent business, and rather than having an indifferent relationship to their products, would produce them with social and ecological responsibility and orient themselves towards delivering quality rather than substandard products. By gaining essential knowledge they would become superior to conventional companies and be able to grasp their chances on the market.

September 1990: Filipino educationalists are also apt to run for the hills when they see entrepreneurs coming. There are no few educational experts who see the market as the work of the devil. They wouldn't mind running the school as a school, but are less keen on running the school as a business. No, we say, the essential drive of an entrepreneur from below cannot be delegated: we need all hands on deck. Discussion with the Filipino educational experts runs through difficult terrain. They shun the idea of this attack from below, especially by the risks involved.

August 1991: The GTZ takes just under four years to digest the application, to cut it drastically and to transfer the first installment. One well-meaning spokesperson says that they hadn't been able to see eye to eye on the approach. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, the Association for Productive Community Schools (APCS) is looking for a manager for the project. Over the next few months, the manager will claim his money but set nothing in motion. The search is on for adults who are really driven. Who will be the entrepreneur? Who is truly willing to work personally with the street children rather than delegating the work? Who will take the risk of opening a restaurant with street children and steer it through the bountiful competition towards success? Time tells that the funding from the GTZ is miserably insufficient.

Prophecies of doom ring out. Bahay Tuluyan is a charity which runs a drop-in center for street children and child prostitutes. Two of their workers want to take part in the founding of the children's restaurant and to offer the children support. The committee of the charity has experience in collecting donations for its work and knows how to run a drop-in center for street children, but children as entrepreneurs? Perish the thought! And a restaurant that wants to contend with the restaurants of the middle class? A culture shock for the street children! The widespread view seems to be that the poor are best suited to projects that won't make them rich. That way, the donations will keep on flowing thick and fast.

February 1992: Grand Opening on the 14th. Come and dine at one of the most unusual restaurants in town, Hapag Kalinga! The name means something like caring banquet, and invites everyone to sit down together and to watch out for one another. According to the prospectus, it is a professionally run restaurant with both Filipino and international cuisine. But it's more than that: It is a street children restaurant where children learn how to be first class entrepreneurs with social responsibility.

No, the Canadian campfire is nowhere to be seen, and nor is fondue being served in front of a backdrop of the swiss alps. Spaghetti there is, but no pasta machine. The tables are covered with clean table cloths and serviettes adorn the plates artistically. The decor gives a modest impression, everything is spotlessly clean and slightly sober. Maybe that's what the Filipino middle class families want. Perhaps otherwise they would stay away from Hapag Kalinga, expecting to be served by grubby children in a grubby restaurant.

Who will be the entrepreneur? Imee Castaneda dared to take the plunge. In her other, rather more conventional job, she runs the department of Business Administration in Trinity College. Now she spends almost more time here – at the edge of Ermita – than there, on the spacious campus. Her colleagues tolerate the project. Luis, Bernito, Ana, Liza, Eman, Julieta and Micheal are the names of the children who want to become entrepreneurs. For the time being there are six of them, this should soon grow to become eighteen. At night they sleep under a bridge, two kilometers away from the restaurant. There, hovels and crates are crammed like swallows' nests between the stinking river and the concrete arches of the bridge, the home of parents, brothers and sisters, relatives. It's the destination to which the landless farmers from Visayas have been driven. Above, the traffic thunders by, leaving behind thick clouds of smog.

At Hapag Kalinga, the children open the door for the guests and say "Manandang tanghali po. Tuloy po kayo". They sound, as Nancy T. Reyes later writes in the Manila Chronicle, "a lot better than those perfunctory Good Afternoon, sir, m'am (sometimes 'good noon' even) department store types. By the door they stood, beaming in their new balintawak costume, their excitement betrayed – how quickly and with wide smiles they flung open the door for the guests".

Here, three generations work together: adults, whose at first still unpaid work ensures that Hapag Kalinga can get off the ground without a trial flight; students from the nearby college of hospitality; and the children, who will replace the students after one year and should later take over the management of the restaurant. During the opening hours – in the afternoon – there is time for the things that remind one most of school: they practise how to set cutlery, fold serviettes, decipher the menu, inspect the quality of fruit and vegetables, meat, fish and rice, read bills; in short, to understand the entire little universe of Hapag Kalinga, step by step. Later on, dealing with business will be more of a focal point, long-term strategic planning and how to handle risks and competitors. Although the children are not shareholders themselves, they will receive part of the profit. The aim is that later, when they leave Hapag Kalinga, they should have a modest sum at their disposal, to be invested in their own mini-enterprise.

The restaurant is situated in the district of Malate, on the corner of St. Andres / del Pilar Street. If you follow the street in the direction of Manila Bay, you pass the Aristocrat after a few meters, the restaurant with all the tables and - still - a good name, even though the service appears somewhat indifferent and the food can't keep pace with that of Hapag Kalinga. The other street leads to Ermita, only a few hundred meters away – and bars and hourly hotels crop up one after the other in a long, dull string of pearls.

The view from the restaurant is a pleasant one. The dignified Malate Church is visible from behind the trees. In front of it, wedding and baptism parties gather. The children have handed out flyers both there and elsewhere. Hapag Kalinga would be happy to cook for such occasions; for reservations, just ring 521-54-99.

There are primarily Filipino dishes on the menu, with an alternating regional emphasis. Panama ni Nanay, literally mother's legacy, because this is grandmother's recipe handed down through generations: pork braised with a piqant sauce of soya, vinegar, spices and – a secret ingredient distinctly Hapag Kalinga. To quench the guests' thirst, there are around sixty drinks, from Kalinga Serenade to Kalinga Vegee Sparkler, many of them fruit or vegetable juices. Without a shadow of a doubt, you can eat and drink well at Hapag Kalinga.

A low-ranking police officer enters, and begins a conversation: the restaurant is empty at night, right? Thieves and arsonists would have it easy. The wicker furniture would burn fast. It's too much work for the police to keep passing by the restaurant and checking everything is alright, because police officers earn so little that they're pretty much on the verge of starvation during the day. The police officer is meanwhile sitting at a able and being waited on like a prince. After the meal, the deal is clear: no protection fee, but one free meal per day for two of the officers from the block. And no staff food: the same food that the guests are served.

In the countdown before the opening as well as the days after, there are small and large catastrophes to survive. The new cook has to be fired again immediately, after leaving the gas tap on and almost causing an explosion. One of the students prefers to act as a call boy than to do his work. The extractor fan in the kitchen breaks down shortly after being installed. With only one more week to go until the opening, Hapag Kalinga looks more like a buildling site. "We are a survival race" says Elisabeth Marcelino, one of the trustees of Hapag Kalinga. And this proves to be true – soon, the building site has been cleared, the kitchen scents are being extracted again and a new cook arrives. Everything is curriculum.

Horst Bauer, a manager who lives in Japan and is on business in Manila, discovers the restaurant more by chance than anything else; expecting a solitary evening, he instead experiences the real quality that makes this restaurant unique: here, it's not a case of staff waiting on customers, but people alongside people, who can talk with each other and feel comfortable together, the children involving the guests and drawing them into the extended family. This is not something which happens by itself, but demands educationalists who don't simply domesticate the wild charm of the children so that only well-mannered politeness remains. Hospitality is a quality which is not dependent on the size of the tip left by the guests as they leave.

November 1992: Many people have helped over the first few weeks. Students from the Free University in Berlin have scrubbed the floor, cleaned the windows and handed out advertising leaflets at theater performances to attract the night owls. Imee's sister Florita organizes the kitchen at the risk of conflict with her seafaring husband. The young psychologist Gladys is the children's good fairy: she is the class-teacher, or rather the restaurant-teacher. William is checking the bookkeeping with concentrated furrows across his forehead. Amihan Abueva, on the committee of the APCS and the general secretary for the Salinlahi Foundation, which is directly responsible for the project, begs her father – one of the country's most renowned sculptors, deemed a national artist during his own lifetime – to tackle the design at Hapag Kalinga and to bring his friends along. Corazon Aquino visits the restaurant while she is still the president of the Philippines.

Must restaurants which are only equipped with a small budget expect an untimely death? No, is the answer. The quality of entrepreneurship can evolve even under a climate of austerity. The crucial point is not to betray the vision of offering real hospitality, authentic regional cuisine, portraying the different regions through the changing decoration of the restaurant, seeing the children as artists and not falling for the temptation to provide even worse imitations of the awful cultural shows put on by other restaurants.

Hapag Kalinga is one step on the difficult path towards the realization in the field of education that the social question needs not only to be asked in a new way, but also answered by new attempts. It is not by collecting donations, shunning the market and spreading anti-economical sentiments that we can help the poor, but rather by offering highly personal support in developing the economy from below and gaining access to the market.

Imee Castaneda is the heart of Hapag Kalinga. A heavy burden of worries often rests on her soul. The next catastrophe might be just around corner, but Imee knows that the process of learning in the midst of insecurity doesn't have to end in a safe harbor. The restaurant is often gapingly empty, and the battle to find clients can sometimes seem futile. But then, the place comes back to life and all seems right with the world, and it is as if Hapag Kalinga had always been a hub of so many friendly people.

The children are the very model of happiness. They have not been touched by the prophesied wave of culture shock. Their school is like theater and cinema all at once, with the only difference that they don't sit and watch, but rather choose the roles themselves. Some of them have scars on their faces, writes Nancy T. Reyes, some are missing teeth, have pock-marks on their legs and their hands show the signs of hard physical labor. "Not talent material for a McDonald's commercial. But take a second look. You might catch a confident smile, and an emerging cheerful disposition. The sparkle in their eyes reveal the beauty of their new-found worth. What picture can ever paint that?"

February 1993: In the GTZ in faraway Eschborn, the frustration is rising. The rent that Hapag Kalinga is paying is far too high, they say. "Regarding the situation of Hapag Kalinga" writes Elisabeth Marcelino, who has meanwhile been voted Outstanding Woman in the Nation's Service, "it has actually improved and picked up financially this month although December was not so good. The prospects are really good in the coming months since there have been lots of reservations and there are days now when the place is really full and jam-packed with people. I really think it's just a matter of time and good management."

The end of the story, for the time being, comes about not only because of the owners of the building, but also by Fidel Ramos, the new Filipino president. The owners demand a rent which is dizzyingly high by local standards, around 1250 Euros, and Fidel Ramos squashes the red light district flat, and with it, drives the life out of the whole district. The problem is not solved – poverty can't be removed simply by making new restrictions. The area now looks like an old, disused film set. Hapag Kalinga doesn't exist on the corner of St. Andres / del Pilar Street anymore. Imee Castaneda writes that they want to re-open somewhere else, that the children are doing well, have found other jobs for the meantime, their entrepreneurial vigor still fully intact and being further trained elsewhere.

The more highly-conceptualized an income-generating school is, the more risky: children and adults earn their living being able to depend on long-term subsidies. This is hard enough for the children, not to mention the adults who are unused to it, especially for those who only earned a modest salary beforehand.

It is for this reason that softer forms of Productive Community Schools are also being piloted. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, a new school arose at the foot of Manila's Smokey Mountain: the Binting Pangarap Productive Community School for small-scale entrepreneurs, which was founded in 1991 with 14 dropouts. Iluminada Woellhaf, the Filipino wife of an immigrant carpenter, financed the building and the small salaries for the adults involved. The various mini-enterprises of the school are run solely by the children. Some are tricycle couriers, others print T-shirts, others sell food in little mobile street-kitchens. The businesses are mostly run in the early morning and in the middle of the afternoon, leaving time in between to gather together, talk about their business deals, conduct small market analyses, check if the kids next door are earning more than them, and to get to grips with bookkeeping, legal questions and cultivation techniques. Seasonal businesses often spring up, and it might be that Joy tells Mrs Woellhaf "M'am, Clarissa won't be coming to the meeting because she got so tired scavenging last night", or that Dionisio tells Ronny Oblepias, the young, capable manager of the school, that he won't be there for the next few days "because I'm called". A ship full of cement has arrived, and he, Roberto and Speedy are all off to unload the sacks for the next few days.

In the Binting Pangarap Productive Community School, there are meanwhile 43 small-scale entrepreneurs who are training for the big time. First, selling half-incubated duck eggs, which are treated as a delicacy, or working on the pier, selling rice, breeding rabbits, trading soft drinks as an answer to the drinking water problem at Smokey Mountain...but the longer-term plan is to open up a bakery together, not one that sells spongy white bread but rather first-class, dark bread, aiming its products at the buying power of Manila's business world. But before this, the small businesses are expanding, such as the basket weavery in the school - outstanding through its design and quality - which has made agreements with 15 partners.

Productive Community Schools could be a thousand colorful flowers, a thousand variations and ventures, experiences which go hand in hand with the growing insight that it makes sense to pick up the children of the poor with their entrepreneurial skills where they already are rather than disqualifying their skills through conventional schooling.

Primary school teachers in the Badagry Province of Nigeria are aiming to become a special variety. Their chief school inspector Yemi Oyeneye observed that not only many of the pupils, but also the badly-paid teachers were playing truant during lessons in order to tend to more economically viable jobs – as taxi drivers, tailors, fruit sellers or smugglers over the nearby border with Benin. For this reason, he called together school leaders and teachers in order to think about the question of how they could turn their regular primary schools into productive ones, and by developing economies which are attractive for all concerned, could increase the amount of time spent in school - combining learning and earning, and raising the income of all stakeholders. The collective brainstorming about entrepreneurial ideas was both fruitful and enjoyable; the teachers no longer had to keep their ulterior lesson plans secret, but could instead partake in an open discussion as to how well the school's potential new trades - for example bamboo furniture, radio repair or coconut extracts - would have to work in order to bring home more than the risky business of smuggling.

In Brazil, Miriam Caetano, a speaker of the Movimento Negro, is lobbying for the introduction of various kinds of Escola Comunitaria Produtiva, with the plan to produce amongst other things Afro-Brazilian toys which can be sold on the still untapped ethnic market. In Thailand, it is the economist and Buddhist Apichai Puntasen who is advocating a kind of rural Productive Community School. In his opinion, the schools from the formal educational sector in rural areas contribute to the destruction of qualifications and skills already held by the children. He is less concerned with founding new schools outside of the established educational system that with deregulating existing schools. "Informalizing all formal schools in rural areas into productive community schools", is in his opinion the most important educational reform.

Two productive schools that have started to run in Nakornrachasima not only struggle along, but are even showing the first signs of success. The economic activities are accompanied by a small curriculum reform, since the aim is to apply interdisciplinary academic knowledge to the key problems of the productive process and at the same time to use the experiential knowledge of the population. The International Community Education Association has promised a total of 5000 Dollars for both schools combined, to be used as a means for investment. The Bumaka school has planted a tree nursery and installed a pond the size of a swimming pool in order to breed fish, as well as beginning to rear cattle. The nursery is already profitable after running for two years and the number of cattle has doubled, still bringing in a profit despite falling prices on the cattle market. Only the fish cultivation brings home less cash, as most of the fish are eaten by the pupils themselves.

The teachers at Bumaka are trying hard – with success – to return the money that was invested quickly into a revolving fund in order to start up new projects. This meant at first that they abstained from paying their pupils and had to learn that pupils, as entrepreneurs, also need economic incentives in order not to lose their motivation. The Gudbost school didn't have these teething problems – they concentrated on rearing chickens and after four production cycles – four generations of hens – had made enough profit not only to replenish their startup capital, but also to plant a tree nursery, having learned from Bumaka's success. New teaching materials arise and are sold to other schools; the text books are not called "Reading", "Writing" and "Arithmetic" anymore, but rather "Fish farming", "Cattle farming" and "Tree nursery", and furthermore contain plenty of the hows and whys of business.

The deregulation of schools works better, naturally, if one does not have to go completely against the grain of the old type of school, but rather can found new ones with an entrepreneurial calculus. And these attempts to walk and fly are more pleasant if they are supported for a while by reliable salaries for the teachers taking part. But how do you motivate teachers to earn money with their pupils? Well-paid teachers with the comfortable status of civil servant would most probably have to be dragged kicking and screaming, and so it may well be some time yet until the circumstances stir up the entrepreneurial vigor of the pedagogical league in this country.

4. The Earthworms of Crussow

So to make the proletarian German common worm happy, you have to set up a wormery with a range of different layers: wet newspaper on the bottom layer, for example, and over that various layers of soil, kitchen scraps and grass - a kind of menu in the the shape of a Christmas tree. And then you let the worms dig their trenches and tunnels up and down, all over the place; and since a happy worm lays 500 eggs, the whole worm farm will soon be wriggling full of worms, old and young, and if it wasn't for the flies who are so partial to worm eggs, it would be the most wonderful wormery ever.

So what shall we do about the flies? Chase them off. And how are we going to do that? If you're one of the children at the kindergarten in Crussow, out in the middle of nowhere in deepest Brandenburg, then discovery learning will spring to mind, and after a bit of back and forth, zig-zag, trial and error, you'll find out that if you put old motor oil next to the wormery then the flies don't like the smell one bit and will stay well away, and it doesn't really matter if the whole kindergarten stinks of motor oil - the important thing is that new worms hatch out of the 500 eggs laid by each happy worm, and that they all wriggle around the wormery, and you can gradually estimate how much you'll earn when you sell three worms for five cents to the local fishing club in Angermünde.

But first you have to harvest the grown-up worms, and it would be a logistical nightmare to have to pick out the old worms one by one after having tipped out the whole contents of the wormery, messing up the multistory menu and ruining the happiness of the worms which are not yet fully grown. So another back and forth, zig-zag, trial and error, until you find out that when you shine a bright light onto the wormery, the older worms come up to the surface and roll themselves into a ball-like formation which you can simply pick up and take away. The harvest is over.

But you're left with a funny feeling in your tummy: because the local fishing club in Angermünde will surely buy plenty of worms from you, but only to make them writhe around desperately on the end of a hook, so the happy worms become very unhappy worms, and you ask yourself why you made so much effort to create them their little paradise on earth. So once again, back and forth, zig-zag, trial and error, until you realize that the soil in Brandenburg is far from fertile, and could profit from any number of worms; and instead of using hooks, the farmers let the worms do useful underground work like the Heinzelmen of Cologne, the mythological gnomes who slaved away while everyone else was asleep. So let's sell the worms to them. Ethic pays.

Then, someone who has just come back from holiday on the Canary Islands tells you about an aristocratic worm of sizable proportions, and how this worm could mean a quantum leap on the Brandenburg fishing or agricultural market. And someone else tells you that there's a similar worm called the Canadian dew worm, which you could introduce, for example, to Berlin-Marzahn, and let it plough through the earth polluted by construction waste between the high rises and make it fertile again... So you get hold of these worms and try to make them happy in a second wormery, only to discover that they don't like it there at all and certainly don't lay 500 eggs. Damn! But if you want to keep them in the open, and you let them loose in the Brandenburg soil and they dive down 7 meters and lay their 500 eggs there, the question is whether you'll ever see them again and be able to harvest them. Another back and forth, zig-zag, trial and error process, culminating in the finding that these damned dew worms won't come back to the surface for all the world, preferring to stay seven meters underground, to hell with your economic interests.

But since the entrepreneurial dealings were such a lot of fun and you have one idea after the next whizzing around in your head, you look around Crussow and notice even with all these bicycles in the village, there isn't a bicycle repair workshop. So with all of your five years, you get together with the kids from the after-school club, the nursery teacher Petra and a few of the parents, you take the basement of your Kindergarten, and you set up a bicycle repair workshop there. You learn everything there is to know about mending bikes and off you go, the people bring their broken bikes to you and you've already forgotten all about the disappointment of the disappearing dew worms, because you're setting sail for new territories.

Enough about Crussow.

But the kids at the 'Sparrows' Nest' Kindergarten in Frankfurt-Oder aren't bad either. It was their fate to attend a nursery school which, originally state-owned, was about to go into liquidation in the nineties. But before the state could oust the nursery, the nursery ousted the state, and 25 nursery staff transformed into 25 entrepreneurs with the common aim to become self-reliant. This meant raising their own stakes of 30,000 DM in the first year, expanding the range of services they offered, and learning - through a course of back and forth, zig-zag, joy and tears – how they could make additional income: and no, not through parental contributions. By the third and fourth years, they were already earning so much that they didn't want to announce it publicly for fear of the city treasurer becoming covetous. This isn't about the adults and their ideas, but rather about the social-entrepreneurial environment at the Sparrows' Nest that rubbed off on the children. 25 nursery teachers seized by the entrepreneurial spirit - and then another 240 children also seized by entrepreneurial spirit – now that is quite something. And so it came about that the children made a successful appearance on the local market by selling Christmas and Easter presents, helped organize company parties and opened an experimental water museum. Soon enough, it seemed strange when a couple of nursery teachers asked for help to cover the travel costs for the Child Welfare Conference in Leipzig that they were planning to attend. We're all earning money here to safeguard our facilities, and now you want to spend it on a trip to Leipzig? Us Sparrows' Nest kids will show you how to get there for free.

Two or three weeks later, in an otherwise little-frequented hall at the fringe of the event in Leipzig, a jostling crowd of people can be seen buying lottery tickets at the 'Market Of Opportunities' stall of the Sparrows' Nest. Every ticket won, the children having made a little prize for each such as a tiny tree standing on a slice of wood decorated with moss and a little fence around the outside. The nursery teachers had soon sold all of the tickets, and told the people standing around that they had to thank the children and their wonderful ideas, which had not only raised the travel costs but even some extra income. And because the buyers and winners themselves wanted to know what kind of kindergarten has children like that, word spread on the fringe of the Child Welfare Conference that entrepreneurship means something like a grassroots economy. So an entrepreneur is someone with nothing, someone who gets an idea in a kind of feverish flush, an idea that doesn't let them go so they ponder and puzzle over it and want to improve it and make it reality. Where? On the marketplace. That's the difference between an entrepreneur and a non-entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is not a businessman. The latter start out by thinking about how they can make a lot of money with mediocre ideas, while the former are busy thinking about how to realize their ideas rather than thinking about money, but at the end - thanks to their brilliant ideas - can create more jobs than a whole bunch of businessmen.

An entrepreneur - someone with nothing - is used to a tight budget. That's why what you might call 'education in entrepreneurship' is an education in intelligent thriftiness: no longer being a slave in the spiral of consumption, but rather having entrepreneurship as a tool to enable better living standards when resources are thin on the ground.

This is a basic qualification which is desirable in every child and every adult. After all, it's better to create jobs for oneself and for others than to chase after non-available ones. And it would be a definite improvement if it wasn't 10% of the German population making jobs for the other 90%, but say 40% or 50%. Like that we could get out of the dirge of economic stagnation.

My requests to education policy? Allow madness into the schools, madness that leads to brilliant entrepreneurial ideas and their realization! Understand that the companies aiming to profit from the education sector by selling milk at break-time have nothing in common with entrepreneurship! Look more closely at what has come of the Turkish youths who failed to pass the PISA test: any number of entrepreneurs! Perhaps not all of them with dazzling ideas, but we failed to polish them beforehand. We, the educationalists, who can't escape the market just by shopping at the organic food store instead.

Entrepreneurship is not the doctrine of the nasty capitalist over there on the other side of the river, but rather an ability which is applicable to us all. We can't teach it if we don't take risks ourselves. That's why schools could – in fact should – become social-entrepreneurial institutions. It rubs off on the pupils. And dusts them off. And breaks down walls. And clears our vision.

5. The Little Dying Factory

In 1989, the curriculum developers at the Secundaria Nocturno department of the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education found themselves in a state of pedagogical emergency. They were supposed to be developing a less boring curriculum for their clientèle - 50,000 evening-class pupils who work during the day - than the secondary curriculum which had also been used for the evening classes until then. They asked their adult pupils for key themes and got the answer: the death of the small factory. Lots of the pupils reported that they work in small, self-managed companies during the day, and many of them were experiencing difficulties in the face of aggression and economical embargoes.

The curriculum developers approached a clothing factory at the edge of Managua. Out of the 140 sewing machines there, only seven or eight were in action. Seamstresses were sitting around and waiting for the end. As the curriculum developers conducted conversations to inquire more precisely into the causes of the descent, they found out that the story of the life and death of the little factory had less to do with aggression and economical embargoes, but rather with the insecurity of revolutionaries as to which is the right way. Right after the victory of the Sandinistas, said the workers, they had discovered a few sewing machines left in the house of a Somocista who had fled, and they began to sew and sell clothes. They had organized everything themselves, from securing a loan through to production, and over time they began to make everything needed in daily life, from children's clothes to bedding. They were both workers and company directors. The number grew from a dozen to well over a hundred. Later, though, the government decided that small businesses should be put under the safekeeping of the Communists. The mayor of Managua sent a young administrator who didn't have a clue about anything but presided over everything. Instead of their previous variety, they now only made uniforms for municipal workers, were dictated quotas, and lost all of their autonomy. And now, just recently, the administrator had suddenly told them that the municipality didn't need anything more and didn't have any other ideas, so now they were on their own.

The curriculum developers saw this story as an expression of the surreal course of events of the revolution and started to plan a curriculum in cooperation with the workers and the evening school pupils, entitled 'How to breathe back life into a dying factory'. But that's not something you can do at a desk. No one knows just how to do it. So the curriculum developers started to mobilize the knowledge of those who had experienced crises and survived them. They decided not to evaluate their curriculum just any old where, but with the seamstresses at the factory on the edge of Managua; to win back lost ground, to send the administrator back to the mayor, to restart their own autonomous administration, to reconstruct lost knowledge, to carry out market analyses, to drum up funds for investment, and to buy an old truck so they can take the blouses, trousers, dresses, shirts, sheets and bedding to market again themselves. We can call our curriculum good, say the seamstresses, if it helps bring us back our work. It is a curriculum of discovery learning with an uncertain outcome.

"Learning in the Market."
Quelle: Günter Faltin / Jürgen Zimmer:
"Innovative Entrepreneurship & Entrepreneurship Education",
A Dossier for the World Economic Forum, Berlin 2012