All across South Africa - in every elementary and middle school - kids are crafting business plans, doing market research, balancing budgets, and hawking everything from hot dogs at 50 cents a pop to car washes for $7 each.

In a dramatic bid to tackle this country's persistent unemployment rate of at least 35 percent, entrepreneurship has become a key part of the evolving postapartheid curriculum. Students can't count on getting good jobs when they graduate, so they're being taught to create their own work - and help forge a kind of Apprentice Nation.

Why can't the American schools embrace an entrepreneurial spirit? Schools are just training students to be dependent employees when they are older, unable to escape "the rat race" and too scared to try. The few who ignore what they learn in school grow up to be successful business owners and rich.

With the global economy and abundant outsourcing, we can't depend on a job market to support all of the Americans. Imagine if we, like South Africa, could soon be a country of employers and not employees. Imagine a nation in which outsourcing is done because there aren't enough people to do the jobs, not as a means of improving financial statements.

We need to encourage students to be independent and make themselves wealthy, not their bosses. But an educational system based on entrepreneurship would require the student to want to learn, to desire to be successful. An educational system based on such a choice is the antithesis of our current system; it is Socratic. And we all know what happened to Socrates...he was accused of "corrupting the youth" and killed.