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When it is done seriously, Tucker concluded, “it gives young people confidence, and that is crucial. To be creative, people need to have the confidence that they can do it.” They also need the confidence to believe that “they can leave their moorings” and explore somewhere new outside their comfort zone.

The best companies already understand this. The adult version of “play” are programs that companies such as Google and 3M have instituted, in which employees are invited to spend 15 or 20 percent of their week working on projects that they devise, which are loosely connected to the company’s main mission but can lead in almost any direction. “It is permission to play on company time,” said Wagner. The programs have been a rich source of innovations for both companies. The website eWeek.com ran a piece (October 31, 2008) about Google’s “20 percent time rule, which allows programmers and other Google employees to spend one of their five work days per week working on something of their own design. These projects stay in-house for a while, but several have been spun off for use in the outside world … Gmail, Google News and Google Talk are among that number.”

The Good News

Fortunately, many American educators, at all levels, are aware of this challenge and are exploring unconventional ways to address it.

In 1981, Steve Mariotti had just left his job as an analyst with Ford Motor Company and moved to New York to start a new business when he got mugged jogging along the East River. Five teens jumped him, beat him up, and stole the $10 he was carrying. Afterward, he said, “I felt like if they had only asked for help, I would have given it to them.” The son of schoolteachers, Mariotti decided after the incident to quit his job and teach in an inner-city school. The transition was rocky. “On his first day at Brooklyn’s Boys and Girls High School,” People magazine reported (September 13, 2003), “troublemakers called him Mr. Manicotti. One pupil set another kid’s coat on fire. ‘I was terrified,’ he says. ‘The principal told me I was the worst teacher in the school … I realized the good kids were getting bullied and tormented by the few who were really bad,’ says Mariotti, who soon changed his teaching methods.”

In a departure from normal practice at that school he decided to teach something that his students wanted to learn—how to make money. Suddenly, said People, they were flocking to his new business class, “a mix of basic math, English, commercial skills and trips to places like a wholesale market.”

The experience eventually led Mariotti to establish, in 1987, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), an organization that helps young people from low-income communities unlock their potential for entrepreneurial creativity by teaching them to start their own businesses, which keeps them in school as they are learning how to do this.

Today more than 330,000 students in junior and senior high schools across America have taken part in a NFTE course or in its national competition for the best new business plan put together by a student age eleven to eighteen. Here is how it works. Once a school has affiliated with NFTE, explained Amy Rosen, the organization’s current president, “we hold NFTE University, where the teachers who will be implementing our program are trained to deliver our unique curriculum”—a mix of math, introductory accounting, entrepreneurship, and economics.

NFTE then provides the schools with its own specially designed textbook, now in its eleventh edition, which teaches the basics of entrepreneurship. The students participate either as a stand-alone course or as part of other courses, such as economics, which requires their mastering a certain level of math. Says Rosen, “You cannot figure out return on investment if you cannot multiply fractions.” The class starts with each student being given $25 to buy something to resell for a profit at a NFTE-sponsored school bazaar. “That’s how you learn the difference