Education Policy, Digital Disruption and the Future of Work by Shane B. Duggan

Author:Shane B. Duggan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030306755
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Draper ’s pairing of teaching only ‘the future’ with ‘survival training’ is illustrative of the ongoing conversation in youth studies scholarship around Kelly’s (2006) ‘entrepreneurial Self’ as introduced in Chap. 3. As he suggests it, “the population of Youth at-risk, in its negativity, illuminates the positivity that is the entrepreneurial Self” (2006, 18). It also picks up on what Facer and Furlong (2001, 463) suggested is an ongoing “debate on what it means to be ‘successfully young’ in the digital age”. Bringing these two perspectives together around Draper’s description of Draper University both reinforces the ways in which young people are cast as at threat from (digital) futures, but also positioned as able to endlessly pivot, entrepreneurially, toward an ever-shifting definition of (digital) ‘success’. The implication of this is two-fold. For Draper, entrepreneurship is a battle for survival: it requires, as Kelly puts it, “entrepreneurial projects in which persons should be engaged—reflexively, continuously, endlessly, for the term of our natural life” (emphasis in original, 2006, 18). Second, it involves, as Mazzotti (2017) suggests, “open[ing] the door on possible futures”. These openings are provisional, experimental, and risky in Draper’s framing, and require both the ‘freedom to fail,’ and type of entrepreneurial Self who “will make a lot of mistakes, so that something like [inventing penicillin, a mistake] will happen and they’ll go off and become great successes” (Draper 2013). Draper continues:

You don’t know what’s coming next. We could make you paint a picture, or you could go car racing, or you might have to rappel a giant cliff. And all of this is a part of entrepreneurial training … all along the way, they’re building their own business—but it’s all group oriented. So you live and die by the team you have been placed with.

The only grades we give are the team scores. And team scores are all tied to extraordinary behavior, spectacular failures, and big successes. I don’t think academically it would make total sense to a lot of professors, but I think if they look at the entire program, they’ll see how extraordinary it is and how we really are changing a lot of people’s lives for the better. (Draper 2013)

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