Today’s Students Need Leadership Training like Never Before.

Our students will find themselves in what I call a micropreneurial age. They will have multiple jobs and even multiple careers during their lifetimes. Many will work for small firms, and a growing percentage will be consultants and freelancers for most of their working lives.

In short, they will need to be equipped to make their own opportunities. They need the skills, knowledge, and qualities that leadership programs cultivate: self-reliance, social and cultural capital, appreciation for lifelong learning, creativity, conflict-resolution and team-building skills, ethics, understanding of economics, and more. Leadership programs recognize that the career ladder of old is broken. In the past, companies could be counted on to develop leaders by ushering bright employees into management-training programs. Today such programs are few and far between. Colleges and universities must do the job.  – Today’s Students Need Leadership Training Like Never Before.

It is absolutely true that students will find themselves in a micropreneurial age. Yes, they need to be equipped to make their own opportunities and they need those sets of skills, knowledge, and nurture those qualities. And that is why I believe in co-operative local, community based learning and homeschooling. These are the kinds of students homeschooling and homegrown education aims to produce.  I have been saying this for the last 7 years and I will continue to say it better, louder and more.

It is absolutely hopeless to believe that colleges and universities can do the job because academia is mainly filled by people looking for a “safe, secure, tenured position”. Academia is filled with sheep, not shepherds. Why pay $150,000 to as much as $300,000 for such programs when it can be done for as low as $5,000 – $10,000 with up to 50% in financial aid, credit and easy repayments?  These skills and knowledge set for the 21st Century can be taught within the scope of second language learning /  homeschooling.   So why not?

Homeschoolers of 21PLC and associates as well as English For Asians students should be products of an education that will equip them to either ride the wave or be just a little ahead of the curve.  While the rest of the world and Asia is learning English for TOEIC,TOEFL, IELTS and other such tests in the hopes of “getting better career prospects”, English For Asians will begin to equip students who will have the cognitive, psychological and emotional skills set to match the trends and turning tides the next few decades of the 21st Century will bring.

We cannot and should not be teaching English as a Second Language  with the mindset of preparing students for more testing towards  global career opportunities – these jobs will not be there by the time they become proficient! We have to teach English with the mindset of  preparing micropreneurs that work from home, micropreneurs who, in their pyjamas,  can systemise an entire business previously requiring dozens of workers while engaging in local community efforts as social-capitalists. We have to have an entirely new conception of what “Business English” means for the next decade of the 21st Century. We have to take seriously the science of Self-Directed Learning and help those born in the late 90s onwards undo what 20th Century schooling has done to their ability to learn, relearn and unlearn.