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264 CONCLUSION: THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY

the Jesuits. But these exceptions were so few that they could safely be
ignored.
In an entrepreneurial society, however, these “exceptions” become
the exemplars. The correct assumption in an entrepreneurial society
is that individuals will have to learn new things well after they have
become adults—and maybe more than once. The correct assumption
is that what individuals have learned by age twenty-one will begin to
become obsolete five to ten years later and will have to be replaced—
or at least refurbished—by new learning, new skills, new knowledge.
One implication of this is that individuals will increasingly have to
take responsibility for their own continuous learning and relearning, for
their own self-development and for their own careers. They can no
longer assume that what they have learned as children and youngsters
will be the “foundation” for the rest of their lives. It will be the “launch-
ing pad”—the place to take off from rather than the place to build on
and to rest on. They can no longer assume that they “enter upon a
career” which then proceeds along a pre-determined, well-mapped and
well-lighted “career path” to a known destination—what the American
military calls “progressing in grade.” The assumption from now on has
to be that individuals on their own will have to find, determine, and
develop a number of “careers” during their working lives.
And the more highly schooled the individuals, the more entrepre-
neurial their careers and the more demanding their learning chal-
lenges. The carpenter can still assume, perhaps, that the skills he
acquired as apprentice and journeyman will serve him forty years
later. Physicians, engineers, metallurgists, chemists, accountants,
lawyers, teachers, managers had better assume that the skills, knowl-
edges, and tools they will have to master and apply fifteen years
hence are going to be different and new. Indeed they better assume
that fifteen years hence they will be doing new and quite different
things, will have new and different goals and, indeed, in many cases,
different “careers.” And only they themselves can take responsibility
for the necessary learning and relearning, and for directing them-
selves. Tradition, convention, and “corporate policy” will be a hin-
drance rather than a help.
This also means that an entrepreneurial society challenges habits and
assumptions of schooling and learning. The educational systems the
world over are in the main extensions of what Europe developed in the
seventeenth-century. There have been substantial additions and modifi-
cations. But the basic architectural plan on which our schools and