Abstract:

Entrepreneurship education is about encouraging creative thinking, and promoting a strong sense of self-worth and empowerment. It is not about teaching someone to run a business. This suggests that beyond starting a business, other important skills are to be gained from entrepreneurship education, which are useful for everyday living and future endeavours. South Africa is experiencing a high unemployment rate for youth aged 15-34, which stands at 38, 2%.

Entrepreneurship is advanced to aid economic growth and tackle unemployment. Globally, research has advocated for the inclusion of entrepreneurship as a subject into the Basic Education curriculum in both primary and high schools. The challenge posed in this study was that entrepreneurship as currently ncorporated in other subjects within the basic education curriculum is not yielding youth who are business-minded. This implies that entrepreneurship is not offered as a standalone subject.

The objective of this study was to investigate teachers’ perceptions on the importance of entrepreneurship education to primary and high school learners in South Africa. The participants were 101 teachers from 25 rural schools in Limpopo, Mopani District, Nkowankowa Circuit in South Africa. A quantitative approach was utilized following the experimental and descriptive designs. Simple random sampling was used to select the participants. About 62 (61.3%) of the teachers were female.

Data were collected using teachers’ attitudes towards entrepreneurial/entrepreneurship education instrument. For this article, the construct about the importance of entrepreneurship education to learners was used. Quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS version 25. Cronbach alpha for the importance of entrepreneurship education construct with 3 items was .91. To establish the face validity of the scores from the TATEE questionnaire, exploratory factor analysis was computed. Based on the four factors, as described by Johansen, face validity was acceptable. The results show that about 64.4% of the teachers indicated that entrepreneurship education postulated knowledge about entrepreneurship as a social phenomenon was important to learners and should be taught in schools.

The results revealed that 68.3% of the teachers were of the opinion that entrepreneurship education, which offered knowledge on how to start a business, was an important aspect that learners need to know. It is recommended that the entrepreneurship be taught as a standalone school and not infused in other subjects like life skills, and Economics and Management Science. As learners regard entrepreneurship as important and need to learn the business skill at an early age, financial and physical resources are a key propellant in achieving this trajectory.

Keywords:

Importance of entrepreneurship education, teachers’ perceptions, curriculum, learners, primary and high school.