ENTREPREUNEURSHIP EDUCATION IN PORTUGAL – CONSIDERATIONS ON THE TOPIC AND ITS DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

The role and importance of entrepreneurship as a booster of economic development has been recognized over time, in line, among others, with Schumpeter (1934), Leibenstein (1968), Kirzner (1997), Baumol (2002) and Acs et al . (2004). The establishment of new businesses is searched and needed, particularly in an economic context such as we are currently living, and this places emphasis on the issue of entrepreneurship education at our schools, which necessarily involves discussion and debate on the topic in order to ensure that results can actually lead us to reach the intended goals. If, on one hand, in Portuguese higher education system can already be found some programs and projects to teach how a business should be thought through and scheduled, on the other hand, presently the discussion consists in the possibility of integration of the entrepreneurship subject on previous levels of education, where the programs contents’ are broader, more global and less specific. This has lead to a discussion on the definition of entrepreneurship, and apparently the option to integrate this issue in primary and secondary education appears to be in line with inducing and facilitating the setting up of attitudes, rather than acquiring business expertise or achieving skills in the economic sphere. Some authors - Hofstede (2001), George and Zahra (2002), Silva et al. (2009) - stated that cultural issues are one of the factors determining and driving entrepreneurial behavior, raising the question that teaching strategies ought to take these conditioning factors into account. The present paper aims to give a brief characterization of entrepreneurship education, particularly in Portugal, and to reflect on how cultural issues can and should guide the teaching strategies and future programs or projects designed to promote the entrepreneurial mind and attitudes at all education levels within the considered territory