"From Economic Literacy to Entrepreneurial Literacy: The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship and Business Conservatism in the United States, 1987-1999"

In the early 1990s, the MCI Communications Corporation began searching for a way to improve its community relations programs and find its own niche in the world of corporate giving. The company’s solution was to take on a novel problem: entrepreneurial illiteracy. To tackle this issue, MCI announced a partnership with the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), promising to provide the fledgling nonprofit with both funding and access to a communications network dubbed the MCI Entrepreneurial Internet. In this paper, I examine the history of NFTE and its quixotic quest to solve urban poverty by inculcating entrepreneurship among young Americans from disadvantaged backgrounds. I argue that NFTE, which was founded in 1987 by Steve Mariotti, represented a new development in a much longer history of efforts to improve the image of business by appealing to young people. As historian Elizabeth Fones-Wolf has noted, businesses in the 1950s began using economic literacy programs to “sell free-enterprise” in American schools. Funded by corporations like MCI and Koch Industries, NFTE certainly continued this business tradition of targeting the capitalist gospel at America’s youth. However, by centering the theoretical and practical promise of “entrepreneurial literacy,” NFTE updated the idea of free enterprise for the neoliberal moment in which it emerged. For Mariotti and NFTE, entrepreneurship not only promised to get kids excited about capitalism, but also held the potential to be a conservative solution to the perennial problems of poverty and urban economic underdevelopment.