Young Entrepreneurs Are Breaking Education Wide Open

When Olivia was 12, she did something most adults never attempt: she worked four different jobs, saved $2,100, and launched Mountain Blue Doodles, a specialized breeding business focused on training service and therapy dogs. No curriculum told her to do this. No standardized test measured it. Yet the education she received through building her business proved more powerful than anything she’d experienced in a traditional classroom.

“My parents loved me enough to allow me to fail,” Olivia explains. “They understood that success often comes after numerous failures, and instead of preventing me from experiencing disappointment, they let me learn from my mistakes.”

Both Olivia and countless other young entrepreneurs I’ve worked with have demonstrated what I’ve come to believe: entrepreneurship is the ultimate education. At OpenEd, we partner with innovative schools and families to create personalized learning paths that break down the artificial barriers between different educational approaches. While we didn’t set out to focus on entrepreneurship, it consistently emerges as one of the most powerful forms of learning possible.

Aiden’s story follows a similar pattern. At 17, he asked a question no textbook assigned: “What if growing healthy food could be done with less work, less water, and no weeding ever?” Using 3D modeling skills from an online course he took through OpenEd, he developed a prototype garden box. When customers pointed out flaws, he redesigned it—then redesigned it again. And again.

Within twelve months, his business generated over $150,000 in revenue, taught him more about engineering and marketing than years of traditional classes and solved a genuine environmental problem in his community.

“The things that you learn when you create a real business are not in textbooks,” Aiden reflects. “They’re things that you experience and see firsthand.”

The False Choice Problem

For over a century, families have faced an artificial choice in education: public school, private school, or homeschool—pick one. This either/or mentality treats these approaches as separate, competing systems rather than what they are: different sets of resources that might benefit the same child at different times or in different subjects.

Entrepreneurship exposes this false choice for what it is. When a young person launches a business, they immediately need diverse knowledge and skills that no single educational approach can fully provide. It creates an authentic need to collaborate with others and begins to identify which interdisciplinary skills are essential for an entrepreneurial pursuit to thrive. A strong team has good writers, coders, designers, communicators, organizers, spreadsheet lovers, and more.

When Olivia decided to start her dog breeding business, her education instantly transcended conventional boundaries. She applied math skills first learned in a textbook, business knowledge acquired through online resources, hands-on animal husbandry expertise through apprenticeship, and legal information from community mentors.

The traditional approach would have forced her to choose: focus on school and put her business on hold, or leave school to pursue her passion. Instead, she created her own integrated path, blending elements from multiple sources.

What we call “open education”—available to every family regardless of which type of school they attend—recognizes that learning happens most powerfully when it’s not confined to a single institution or approach. The entrepreneurial student naturally gravitates toward whatever resources best serve their purpose, regardless of which “box” those resources come from. Their education becomes open not by academic theory, but by necessity and purpose.

The Market Test vs. The Test Market

Conventional education asks students to learn now and apply later—perhaps years later. Entrepreneurship reverses this equation. Application comes first, with learning pulled in as needed to solve real problems.

This reversal fundamentally changes how we measure success. In conventional education, we create artificial test environments to simulate real-world conditions. In entrepreneurship, the real world is the test.

The marketplace rewards creativity, research skills, persistence, teamwork, collaboration, and the ability to learn from mistakes—all qualities often discouraged in traditional testing.
When a student submits an essay on conservation for a grade, they’re operating in a test market where one person—the teacher—evaluates their work against predetermined criteria. When Aiden designed a garden box that uses 80% less water, the actual market tested his work. Real customers with real problems determined its value.

The market provides honest, unfiltered feedback about whether you’ve created something of value. And this feedback operates with remarkable democracy. It doesn’t care about your age, your background, or your learning differences—only whether you’ve created something worthwhile.

For students who’ve struggled in traditional environments, this represents a profound shift. Suddenly, their unique thinking styles—the very qualities that might have been labeled as problems in a standardized classroom—become potential strengths in the marketplace of ideas.

Research by Julie Logan, a Professor of entrepreneurship at London’s Cass School of Business, reveals this advantage clearly: about 35% of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic, compared to roughly 15% of the general population. Many traits often considered liabilities in school settings—divergent thinking, questioning assumptions, restless energy, hyperfocus on areas of interest—become assets in entrepreneurial contexts.

Richard Branson, who left school at 16 due to learning differences, later built the Virgin empire and credited his “different way of thinking” as a key to his success. His story mirrors countless other entrepreneurs who found their learning differences became advantages when applied to solving real-world problems.

The question isn’t which educational box is best. The question is how we might break open all the boxes, allowing each learner to access whatever combination of resources they need.

Matt Bowman

Theory vs. Practice

The gap between traditional education and entrepreneurial learning becomes apparent when we consider real examples. A student might earn an A+ on a hypothetical business plan that would fail catastrophically in reality. Conversely, a student might create a financially successful business while struggling to articulate the academic principles behind their decisions.

Which represents true learning? The conventional model prioritizes theoretical understanding over practical application. The entrepreneurial model values results over process. The open education approach recognizes that both matter, but neither should be confined to a single learning environment.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of entrepreneurial learning is how it naturally integrates knowledge that conventional education artificially isolates. Aiden’s garden box venture required him to apply principles of physics, environmental science, economics, marketing, and design. Olivia’s dog breeding business demanded an understanding of genetics, animal behavior, business finance, and customer service.

This integration happened not because a curriculum designer carefully planned these connections but because real work inherently crosses subject boundaries. Their market experiences provided immediate feedback not on isolated skills, but on how effectively they integrated these different elements. Customers don’t care whether you can label variables in an equation; they care whether you’ve solved their problem.

Opening Education Through Entrepreneurship

This entrepreneurial approach points toward something bigger: the possibility of truly open education that transcends the false choices families have faced for generations.

The question isn’t which educational box is best. The question is how we might break open all the boxes, allowing each learner to access whatever combination of resources they need.

In my new book, Open Education: How to Reimagine Learning, Ignite Curiosity, and Prepare Your Kids for Success, I explore this vision in greater depth—showing how families and educators can create truly personalized learning experiences that transcend traditional categories.

These questions are being answered every day by young people like Olivia and Aiden, who refuse to accept the false choices the closed system created. They’re drawing lessons from traditional classrooms, online courses, community mentors, family wisdom, and market feedback—creating integrated learning experiences that defy our neatly labeled boxes.

They’re showing us that education can be truly open—not through sweeping policy changes, but through the simple, powerful act of creating something that matters. And in doing so, they’re teaching us something profound about learning itself: it happens not in isolated institutions but at the intersections where knowledge meets purpose, passion meets need, and individual growth meets community impact.

That’s a lesson worth spreading.