A New Approach in Preschool Education: Social Entrepreneurship Education

Abstract

The preschool years is a critical period for children because of the fact that their speed of learning and development is at the highest level in this period. If the education, which is offered during this period, has the qualities to support children's social-emotional, cognitive, physical, and linguistic development, it has great importance for children in terms of living their development positively. In order to support qualities of preschool education and enhance its positive effects on children's development, it is quite important to integrate new educational approaches into preschool education. Social entrepreneurship education is one of these approaches recently emergent. Through providing social entrepreneurship education, it is possible to develop children's abilities and enable them to produce innovative solutions to social problems. In order to achieve this, children needs to meet social entrepreneurship education in their developmental period. Social entrepreneurship education, which is taken during preschool period, has many positive effects on children in terms of individualistic aspect. Social entrepreneurship education gives children a chance to experiment what is taught in the school through living in daily life, and in this way, it makes education lifelong by supporting all developmental areas of children. In addition to that, social entrepreneurship education supports children's self-sufficiency, creativity, empathy, rational thinking, and entrepreneurship skills. Moreover, because it is given in a critical period, it has important place in children's life and has an impact on children's academic and social success through both preschool and higher education. In this context, the aim of the study is to reveal the need of school entrepreneurship education, and in parallel with this, to identify individual benefits of social entrepreneurship education which can be applied in preschool education institutions in where children meet with education for the first time.