Running A Family Enterprise Should Be In Basic Education

Each parent is thinking about what the future will be for the family after the first child is born. They will be thinking, should I get a stable job or risk starting a business. More than half will consider taking a job. At least most would until the second or third child is born. After that they start wondering if they can even spend for school for all three.

A Family Business is a Palatable Alternative to Fix Income Employment

This is the part where having a small business starts to look palatable. Even with the perceived associated risk. So one of the parents starts doing side hustles. There are many options until one of the side hustle starts earning more than what the employed parent is earning. The side hustle starts demanding time and effort from both parents.

Understanding a bigger group of customers starts getting complex. The selling process gets more complicated. Delivering products demands more resources and effort. Keeping track of sales and expenses starts either making you scared or making you insane. And you start wondering in the coming years why customers don’t buy the same thing or on the same frequency.

You start hiring people to deliver or help you deliver products or services. You start hiring people just to keep tabs on sales and expenses. Next you hire people who just organize the paperwork on sales and expenses. Then you hire people to keep tabs on people. Then you  realize you need to manage people who keep tabs on people or learn how to legally fire them. This will go on and on.


Entrepreneurship Should Be in Basic Education

After several years, you start asking why your school never taught you these insanely obvious skills you need to run a business.

Why were you not taught to use an electronic calendar to schedule appointments, deliveries, and schedule of payments?

Why were you not introduced to spreadsheets to organize your sales and expenses? Or why were you never taught to use word processors to make sales letters, letters of introductions, flyers, pamphlets, and brochures? Of course you were taught features of this software but not really how to use them.

I asked these questions myself when I was working with DepEd and CHED about improving the curriculum. The answer is always the same. It’s regulations. It’s not about logic. It’s not about applicability. It’s remotely related to even development. It was just regulations. Like gospel. These regulations institutionalized functional illiteracy for decades.


So Let’s Change the Law!

It is unfortunate that those who carry PhDs in DepEd and CHED determine much of our children’s future. I thought by now we should have leap frog to a new way of educating the next generation. We haven’t. I think we should be involved in determining what should be relevant in the content of our educational systems.

Personally, I spend from at least a week to several months training people with college degrees and MBAs to learn the basics of business and entrepreneurship for them to be “functional” on the job. Add the required technology literacy, and it basically means teaching a whole curriculum in a few months what people should have learned in Basic and Higher Education.

If you read between the lines, what DepEd and CHED is saying, they can’t change the curriculum to be responsive unless we change the law creating the regulations.

So, let’s change the law!

This is the gist of policy reform. Change the law if we have to if we are to drive development forward.

We can’t do policy reform if stakeholders, citizens are not engaged in the process.

I also want to introduce algorithms, software development, computers, and agricultural technology in elementary education. 

I want to integrate the basics and introduction to accounting, finance, business, entrepreneurship, leadership, finance, branding, and digital marketing in junior and senior high.

I want to change the rules so that when kids get to be in high school they can either start their own enterprise or help their parents grow the family business.

If you want to change the business climate to create opportunities for your family business, you have to change the law that governs it.

Will you participate in getting more recognition for the family enterprise as a legitimate business category?

Please visit our About Us page to know more about who’s supporting me in this policy reform.

Until my next post.