Could the Next Steve Jobs Come From Philly?

The lessons we pass along to our children reflect our own individual values, of course, but what—and how—we teach our kids is also shaped by the era in which we live. The widespread growth of free public schools in America in the mid-1800s aligned with the country’s geographic growth and a desire to develop responsible, productive citizens. The creation of the Boy Scouts in the early 20th century, with that organization’s emphasis on character and specific skills, was born of the fact that millions of families were suddenly moving from farms to cities—and feared that boys would no longer learn the lessons rural life had taught them.

So what does this new impulse—to turn kids into entrepreneurs—tell us about our times? Well, for starters, it reflects the geek-chic sexiness of our current start-up culture—a best-seller about Steve Jobs! An Oscar-winning movie about Mark Zuckerberg!—as well as the idealism that’s long been embedded in Internet culture. To Web pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee and Vinton Cerf, the digital revolution wasn’t about making money; it was about flattening the walls that kept knowledge siloed and leveraging collective human wisdom to make the world a better place. The Internet wasn’t invented to spread cat videos or let Kim Kardashian tweet—though it’s done a mighty fine job at those things. It was created to transform humankind.

You can hear echoes of that bigger- than-just-me ethos in the burgeoning baby-entrepreneur movement. As Mark Greenberg said to me, “We want to create problem-seekers, not just problem-solvers.”

And yet at the same time, there’s a more sober motivation for the Baby Zuckerberg movement: the harsh slap across the face the Great Recession gave all of us. In the weekend Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, the old social compact—already straining under the force of globalization—blew apart completely. Suddenly, the bargain that generations of parents had bought into—get your kid through college and the rest will take care of itself—was no longer operative. If a kid was to survive (let alone thrive) in this new world, he would need to learn to be creative and savvy, adaptive and opportunistic—to live by his wits.

Which raises the question: Can the traits that make someone a great entrepreneur truly be taught? History might suggest otherwise. Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, Ford—few of our most innovative minds were the products of calculated systems. On the contrary, they mostly succeeded because they looked at the world in a different way from everybody else and rebelled against the system.

It’s one of the ironies you can’t help noticing about our current start-up culture: how conformist it’s actually become, from concocted company names that don’t mean anything to office cultures that embrace casual dress, free beer and ping-pong. For a group of people who say they live by Steve Jobs’s famous dictum of Think Different, they all seem to, well, Think Kinda the Same.