‘Not All of Us Can Be Nurses’: Proposing and Resisting Entrepreneurship Education in Rural Lesotho

Claire Dungey,Nicola Ansell

doi:10.1177/1360780420944967

Claire Dungey, Nicola Ansell

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780420944967

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Abstract

Education in Lesotho, as in much of the world, has historically held out the promise of a ‘better future’. Success in school and the achievement of academic credentials were expected to lead to a secure future in the formal economy. With increasing school enrolment and growing youth unemployment, such futures are now illusory for most youth. In 2009, Lesotho introduced a radical new curriculum that aims to instil in young people skills and attitudes for entrepreneurship, enabling them to build their own futures in an increasingly uncertain world. Based on 9-months’ ethnographic fieldwork in two primary schools and their surrounding rural communities, we trace how the new curriculum is being delivered in schools and how it is intervening in children’s aspirations. Despite lessons intended to prepare them for livelihoods in the informal economy, young Basotho prize the security of a salaried job as a nurse, teacher, police officer, or soldier. We frame this contradiction in relation to concepts of doxic and habituated aspirations, concluding that due to the way schools deliver entrepreneurship education it both fails to displace long-standing doxic aspirations to professional careers, and fails to engage with young people’s habituated expectations of rural livelihoods.

Highlights

Children’s access to education has expanded dramatically over recent decades, in large part due to international initiatives, such as the United Nations’ Education for All and Millennium Development Goals
Based on 9-months’ fieldwork conducted in 2017–2018 in two rural communities and their respective primary schools, we explore how Lesotho’s entrepreneurship education is implemented and received and its effects on emerging aspirations
Despite the changes in curriculum, school children continue to prize the security of a salaried job. Nor their teachers, understand the role of school to be the inculcation of skills and attitudes for rural livelihoods. We explore this apparent ineffectiveness of entrepreneurship education in relation to a framework put forward by Zipin et al (2015) that sees young people holding simultaneously doxic aspirations and habituated aspirations

Summary

Introduction

Children’s access to education has expanded dramatically over recent decades, in large part due to international initiatives, such as the United Nations’ Education for All and Millennium Development Goals. Initiatives to promote youth entrepreneurship often fail to address the structural processes constraining young people at national and global levels that limit their capacity to succeed (Hajdu et al, 2013; Snellinger, 2018), leaving them to assume risks caused by economic instability and uncertain labour markets (DeJaeghere and Baxter, 2014). Students are expected to acquire skills for entrepreneurship, and to take responsibility for their learning and recognise it as something to be applied or ‘employable’ (see Simons and Masschelein, 2008) Beyond critiques of such ‘responsibilisation’ (Simons and Masschelein, 2008), entrepreneurship education seldom adequately attends to the economic and social constraints inhibiting young people (DeJaeghere and Baxter, 2014). The research we report on in this article sought to explore how young people develop aspirations through their engagement with primary school

Methodology and the research settings

Findings

Conclusion