Public schools don’t teach freedom-based entrepreneurship

Take a closer look at your local school district’s mission statement. Odds are, it’s not preparing your kid for freedom-based entrepreneurship.

I attended government school, unfortunately, between 1995 and 2009. And the government school I graduated from, per a calendar I saw at my parents’ place in August 2024, paraded the three ‘E’s: Enrollment. Enlistment. Employment.

The message couldn’t be clearer: We’re limiting your future to more schooling, a stint in the military, or working for someone else. Missing from this tidy slogan? Entrepreneurship. 

Or, as I like to say, freedom-based entrepreneurship. By freedom-based, I mean one built outside state-sanctioned systems, with minimal licenses, no bailouts, no central bank dependency, and no bureaucratic leashes.

And that omission’s no accident, mark me. It’s the system doing exactly what they designed it to do.

The system wants cogs in the machine, not innovators

You can find their roots in the Prussian-based education model, designed to produce obedient workers, loyal soldiers, and compliant citizens.

That model still governs the classroom today: bells ringing, sitting in rows, asking permission to speak, to stand, and to use the restroom. Children learn early that self-ownership is a privilege, not a right, and that they must obey authority without question.

In this environment, entrepreneurship’s a threat. Why?

Because freedom-based entrepreneurs don’t wait for permission. They don’t fill out forms to start creating. They challenge the rules, question the system, and bypass the gatekeepers. These are exactly the traits public schooling conditions its victims to suppress.

Public schools offer sanitized business education

When entrepreneurship is taught, it’s often watered down and sterilized. The goal becomes building “small businesses” that slot neatly into the status quo: Get a loan, open a shop, follow all the regulations, and don’t disrupt the powers that be.

There’s no mention of building parallel systems, bootstrapping and resisting debt traps, disrupting entrenched industries, and rejecting state interference altogether.

Hell, the curriculum rarely touches free-market economics at all. You’ll get Marx, Keynes, and a nod to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but Mises, Rothbard, Bastiat, or even Hayek are nowhere to be found.

It wasn’t until I had an economics teacher in college with enough balls to buck the system that I even learned about Mises or the Austrian School of Economics.

Most government educators trash capitalism as corporate greed, not voluntary exchange. These cats also discourage risk-taking and view success outside the system with suspicion.

What “career readiness” really means

Let’s be blunt: “Career readiness” is code for servitude readiness.

As far as my old school goes, it’s grooming its victims to become employees in tightly regulated sectors, enlistees in government-run institutions to uphold an empire that’s $37 trillion in debt, or graduates of debt-financed colleges designed to keep them dependent.

I fell for the latter, but fortunately, I didn’t fall too far into the rabbit hole and will have my debt paid off rather quickly.

That said, they’re not prepared to be independent thinkers, alternative system architects, or creators of value outside centralized control.

And that’s by design. A self-employed person’s not easy to propagandize, especially when they engage in unlearning. A business owner doesn’t need to beg a bureaucrat for permission to live, especially if they created a freedom-based business.

Reclaiming the fourth ‘E’

The fourth “E”—Entrepreneurship—is the antidote to the others. It’s how you build wealth without waiting for permission, and how you push back against a system that pretends to care about you, but sees you as either cannon fodder, a cog in the machine, or a tuition check.

It’s also the clearest path to freedom.

If you want real empowerment, forget the Three E’s. Start teaching the fourth.

So, teach kids how to start with nothing and build, how to solve problems, that failure is part of the process—not something to fear, that they own themselves, and no institution, employer, or government can define their worth.

Because the future belongs to those who create it, not to those who merely comply.

Now, you’re up to bat

Usually, this is where I try to sell you something, and hey, check out the prequel to my young adult academy fantasy that challenges the system if you want. You made it this far, so I’ll assume dissenting fiction’s up your alley.

But today, I want to introduce you to Tom Woods, from whom I learned a lot of business tricks and tactics. If you’re looking for a way out, either of government schooling or to start your own freedom-based business, Tom’s systems will rewire the mind.