SACRAMENTO, CA -- Perhaps the saddest irony in education today (and one of my pet peeves) is that American students live in the greatest capitalist country in the history of the world, yet end up leaving school not knowing the first thing about how capitalism works. How does one start a business? How does one develop and market a product? How are prices established? Ask a high school senior any of these questions and one is almost guaranteed to get a blank stare.

Someone who recognizes this woeful situation and is doing something about it is successful Bay Area businessman Tim Draper. Says Draper, "I had a terrific education, but I never learned anything about business. I never learned how to start or run a business. I never learned how it really worked. So I wanted to create a course for children to understand business."

Draper's innovative program, BizWorld, is an exciting Entrepreneurship 101 for schoolchildren. It's a fun, intense four-day course that makes use of parent and community volunteers who go into a classroom, explain the fundamentals of business to students, and then help students put what they learn into action. On the first day of class, all students are asked to think about the design of their product. (BizWorld provides different colored string so students can produce friendship bracelets), put their design on paper, and then build a prototype. The students are grouped in teams which incorporate, receive shares of "stock", then sell those shares in exchange for game currency which are then used to buy string, tape and other supplies.

On day two, students receive instruction about the banking system, learn how to take out business loans, buy necessary supplies, and manufacture the bracelets. On day three, students are taught about marketing and sales, create their own advertising posters, and sell their products to students from other classes. Finally, on the fourth day, students create a balance sheet and income statement, receive stock prices associated with their financial statement, and come to understand how wealth is created.

Watching children respond to BizWorld is inspirational. They are engaged, enthusiastic and remarkably quick to learn. Their boisterous discussions about how to perfect their product, their creativity in advertising, and their clever salesmanship demonstrate the massive entrepreneurial potential that is wasted under our current curriculum. After going through BizWorld, one little girl exclaimed, "I used to think that with math, I'd never use it." According to Tim Draper, that's a key point. Kids learn that to do well in business, they have to be skilled in math, reading and writing, and in art. Indeed, a four-day course in BizWorld would probably do more to stoke interest in math than years of "new, new math."

The societal bottom line: imagine if all children in poor inner-city areas received BizWorld instruction. Instead of looking to a future of welfare dependency, these children could contemplate the possibility of becoming entrepreneurs and perhaps becoming catalysts for the economic revival of depressed urban neighborhoods. Now that's a prospect that would be worth the investment.

--By Lance Izumi