Abstract:
The steady rise of entrepreneurialism in schools, including as a discrete element of the formal curriculum, is positioned by its proponents as social and educational good. The lack of definitional clarity, its positive positioning within wider discourses of school marketisation, and the presence of a questionable embedding of economic priorities within the Mparntwe Declaration (2019) are critiqued through both Etzioni’s communitarian political theory and Piketty’s work on economic inequality. This analysis leads to a concern that entrepreneurialism has the potential to become a new form of the mercantilism that dominated global commerce in the 18th and 19th centuries, rather than a transformational innovation well-suited to 21st century social democracies.