SOCRATES AND THE ART OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Socrates was a master of asking the right question. He believed that by asking the right questions, anyone could learn the right answers. We agree. At the Acton Foundation, we believe in "learning by doing" and the Socratic Method. We believe that the right thinking and analysis lead to the right actions, the right actions become habits, the right habits lead to character, and character becomes destiny.
To teach by the Socratic Method, a teacher must truly believe that questions are more important than answers, and that students learn best by doing.
PATTERN RECOGNITION
How do you teach judgment? Chess players become chess masters by playing chess, over and over again, until like a general surveying a battlefield, they begin to recognize the patterns formed by the pieces on a chessboard.
The 300 cases in Acton's curriculum help students develop this same sense of pattern recognition in the great game of business. Students develop judgment and intuition by standing in the shoes of real entrepreneurs and making high-stakes decisions. That way, when they face a problem in the real world, they'll be able to say: "I've seen this before and I know that the most important question to ask is..."
Did you ever wonder why a chess master can defeat even the most powerful supercomputer? How can this be true when a computer can "think" in billions of sequential moves per second, far faster than any human? Chess masters don't think in sequential moves, but see the patterns in a chess game like a general sees patterns in the movements on a battlefield. Sure, a chess master understands sequential moves and strategies, but it is pattern recognition that separates the chess masters from the merely good players. How do you become a chess master? By playing chess, ten hours a day, for fifteen years.
Intuition, the power of pattern recognition, is one of the most powerful outcomes of AFEE's curriculum. Students see literally hundreds of business patterns as they make decisions, acting as real entrepreneurs facing real-world problems.
LEARNING TO FLY
Many business schools lecture to students, teaching tools and skills by rote and stressing memorizing terminology and arcane theories over action. Learning with the AFEE curriculum is like flying a complex flight simulator. Students work hard to learn the tools and systems. Then they crawl into the simulator, with an experienced entrepreneur as co-pilot, asking all the right questions. Engines quit, lightning strikes, and pressures mount. The student soon believes that he or she is in a real entrepreneur's shoes. Sometimes the airplane crashes, but the entrepreneur merely pushes the "reset" button and the plane is back on final approach, giving the student a chance to try again.
The stakes feel high in a classroom using an AFEE course. But the classroom is just a business simulator, preparing students to make difficult decisions when real money and real lives are on the line. Most importantly, like a flight simulator, students are placed in real-world dilemmas to show them why they need specific tools. Once they understand why they need them, they'll want to learn them.