Education can be less about compliance and more about painting a reality for indispensable students who do not need permission to color outside the lines, build without a map, embrace wonderment, and never fear the beauty of their own inextinguishable light.
Extra Shot
Students do not need permission to build on the timeline of now.
Whether it’s rethinking career day in elementary school, high school students flexing innovative muscles earlier, or college students earning a degree while also building a profitable business, the education system is becoming more than just a machine to produce factory workers. Students must still learn to play the game of school, but it’s not all about following rules, good grades, and earning that expensive piece of paper to work for someone else.
Students become leaders when an educational system welcomes the weird. No matter the age, curiosity and initiative are required to go beyond the status quo, but that happens more often when students are introduced to the opportunities of an entrepreneurial lifestyle.
The future of education is providing a safe space to learn how to learn. To explore knowledge, different cultures, social interactions, and activities that feel like play to us but look like work to others. Along with activating students in the classroom, invaluable insights await educators who prioritize activity outside the walls of a school. Participating within a startup community is often seen as extra effort for educators already asked to do so much, but there is ease in leveraging community members eager to share experiential wisdom in the wild as well as back inside the classroom.
As we keep things interesting by colliding students with founders and intrapreneurs, educational organizations infuse recurring energy into startup communities and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Ongoing collaboration is required between educators and community builders, but as lines blur between classrooms and community, students are introduced to reality.
When students are set free to paint their own future in ways that transcend a class, school feels less like day care. A thirst for conformity can be replaced with curricula that rewards pure wonder and life-long learning for students of all ages.
Brewed From Within
#55 📖 Leadership
1 Comment
Ben McDougal · September 8, 2026 at 1:54 PM
ORIGINAL – 5/3/21
Educational organizations are key actors within entrepreneurial ecosystems. As a community builder, collaborating with students and leaders within educational organizations has been enlightening.
While I’ve always enjoyed exploring the intersections between entrepreneurship, innovation and education, it feels like I’ve been thinking and talking about the future education a lot more lately.
Perhaps it’s my Regional Rep role for an educational program like 1 Million Cups? Maybe it’s how many caffeinated community builders I’m supporting, who also work in this space? Blunt thought provocations from Naval Ravikant keep me on the edge of my seat and having a daughter who’s about to experience the classroom for the first time has to play into my heighten curiosity as well. It’s clear that my interest in education does not emerge from a single source. It’s the collective interactions. It’s my interest in accelerating others. It’s wanting the best for my little startup that pays in love. Even deeper, it’s an optimistic enthusiasm for our future.
Our connected era and the rising cost of higher education seems to be signaling a cultural shift. It’s less about earning a piece of paper so you can work for someone else. The future of education feels more like providing a safe space to explore knowledge, social interactions and what creative activities feel like play to you, but look like work to others.
We learn, earn and then give back. My hope is that we can inspire future generations to go beyond what we think is possible. Can we leave behind parts of the system that feel like day care and replace them with curricula that reward pure wonder, initiative and skills that help more people evolve ideas into reality? Outside the classroom, can we celebrate life-long learning and those who break down barriers so more people are set free to push past the status quo?
As Greg Horowitt said in our conversational jazz, without order nothing can exist, but without chaos, nothing can evolve. Let’s build for the sake of our future, by never fearing unicorns in our balloon factories.
Comments are closed.