Entrepreneurship Education and Emancipation: A Political Perspective

The evaluation of entrepreneurship education’s impact has caused much debate. In part this is driven by varying notions of what its purpose is. What we propose to do in this paper is extend these discussions into the political domain. While we recognise that entrepreneurship education is not typically associated with, or indeed even attempts to foster political change, we argue that in its essence it converges with Critical Pedagogy, especially in its empowering function (Santos et al., 2019). More directly Hägg and Kurczewska (2016) allude to Freire’s (2005 (1972)) notion of praxis and its democratising function in relation also to entrepreneurship education. Taking this possible convergence between entrepreneurship education and Critical Pedagogy as a starting point for our exploration, we assess the extent to which EE leads to the growth in interest in politics and a greater willingness to engage in politics and therefore assumes a (political) emancipatory function. To test these ideas we draw on a sample of sixty Danish students engaged in entrepreneurship education. In a pre-and post-intervention design, we sought to establish the extent to which education develops a number of political attributes associated with emancipation: socio-political control, political interest, civic engagement and changes in political orientation in students. Although results were not conclusive, there was an indication that political measures had changed. Given the absence of research on the political outcomes of EE at the level of the individual this study sets the scene for further work in this area.