Training, training for entrepreneurial intent, at the cost of what educational challenges ?[Former, se former à l’intention entrepreneuriale, au prix de quels défis pédagogiques ?]

Research on education and entrepreneurship is not new. Mc Clelland was the first author to be interested in the entrepreneurial behavior of students in the early 1960s. But the emergence of studies and research on the question really took place during the decade of the decade 1990. Thus, from 1996, Julien and Marchesnay counted more than 3000 publications per year on the field of entrepreneurship, distributed in about forty symposia and around twenty specialized journals. Today, this field has become a discipline in its own right and has been accompanied in parallel by a desire by an ever-increasing number of players to develop the spirit of entrepreneurship among different audiences and especially among young people. Over the past decade, we have seen that schools and universities are increasing the number of entrepreneurship training programs. Describing the characteristics of these training courses, and clarifying the very variable of entrepreneurship would require developments, the presentation of which would consume all the necessarily limited space which is granted to us. In this article, we will mainly concentrate our analysis on the situation in higher education by examining the posture of the pedagogue who puts his action at the service of the development of the entrepreneurial intention of the students. This aspect is not limited to identifying the educational difficulties encountered by the trainer to generate an entrepreneurial spirit. We also raise here the question of the pitfalls of a project pedagogy and entrepreneurship when it claims to awaken and develop in others their creativity and their spirit of initiative. Because, like this monster of which Philippe Meirieu (1996) evokes the figure in his "Frankenstein teacher", there is a risk that this type of training could backfire on the student himself. The analysis of educational practices in this area will serve to explain the difficulty of predicting entrepreneurial intention and even of trying to teach or develop it through relevant educational interventions.