Building Entrepreneurial Organizations to Make Learning in School Relevant (Innovations Case Discussion: iDiscoveri)

Abstract

Living Knowledge System, an approach to improving the quality of education in India, demonstrates that there is room for entrepreneurs to innovate in education and to help fill the gap in the quality of education. This quality gap affects the vast majority of the world’s children, who have gained access to school as the result of the reforms and innovations of the last four centuries, which made basic education accessible to most around the world. The achievement of universal schooling was the result of a series of innovations introduced by policy and social entrepreneurs who built the global architecture that sustains compulsory access to basic education. The first among those innovators was Jon Amos Comenius, a Moravian minister who, upon reflection on the sources of violence and conflict, concluded in the seventeenth century that the foundation of peace rested in educating all people. This novel idea formed the foundation of national public education systems, a social innovation that would expand to a number of countries in Europe over the next two centuries. Central to the development of public education systems were technological innovations that made it possible to educate large numbers of children, with a limited number of skilled teachers, at low cost. Chief among them was the monitorial system of education, developed by Joseph Lancaster in the early nineteenth century, which allowed teachers to be assisted by students in a system of peer education in which a narrow, well-defined curriculum could be taught by more advanced students, or