Podcast: Enterprise Through Literature in High School

By the time professor Rajshree Agarwal meets University of Maryland undergraduate students, most already have formed opinions on the value of enterprise and markets. “Much of their conceptions and misconceptions are created at the middle and high school levels,” says Agarwal, director of the Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the Robert H. Smith School of Business. In this podcast with Smith communications director Daryl James, she discusses Enterprise Through Literature, a program that introduces secondary students to the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism. As part of the program, supported by the Cato and Ayn Rand Institutes, 17 high school teachers from across the United States came to College Park, Md., on July 20-21, 2015, to develop lessons plans and share teaching resources. “All we really want is for the students to start thinking in terms of these issues and how they relate to the real world,” Agarwal says.