OPINION:
Few U.S. high school students have probably heard of Westinghouse, the company, or George Westinghouse, its founder. He was born in Central Bridge, New York, on Oct. 6, 1846, a year after the Albany & Susquehanna Railroad opened a station in the tiny hamlet.
Yet George Westinghouse was an important figure in America’s rise as the world’s preeminent industrial power. One of the entrepreneur and inventor’s earliest inventions, at age 23, was the air brake, which enabled trains to stop faster and with greater precision, vastly improving rail safety.
Earnings from the air brake and another Westinghouse innovation called a “frog,” which enabled trains to switch tracks quickly and safely, helped fund Westinghouse’s future activities, including his pioneering work with Nikola Tesla in electricity and electric motors.
Over time, according to the Library of Congress, Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co. would amass 361 patents for inventions, “both [George Westinghouse’s] own … and … of others that he felt would benefit his work.”
The company would also become deeply involved in broadcasting and have more than 60 factories producing items such as home appliances, consumer electronics (radios, phonographs and TVs) and giant power generators. A successor company today is a major nuclear power player.
What’s most remarkable about Westinghouse’s story is how unremarkable it is. Yet stories about innovators and entrepreneurs are stories about America.
The word entrepreneur means different things to different people. Economist Joseph Schumpeter, famous for coining the term “creative destruction,” argued that entrepreneurship is a disruptive innovation. Economist Frank Knight, founder of the Chicago school of economics, defined an entrepreneur as a risk taker, someone who bears the risk of an undertaking and benefits from its rewards if the undertaking succeeds.
New York University economist Israel Kirzner identifies the entrepreneur as someone who is alert to otherwise unnoticed opportunities, which Peter Boettke of George Mason University has likened to “picking up $100 bills that others ignore.”
Just as the many innovations reshaping our world today (artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, “the cloud,” drones, electric vehicles, social media) are powered by entrepreneurs, the United States itself was founded and shaped by entrepreneurs, some of the most innovative political thinkers the world has ever known.
Although most entrepreneurs are celebrated for one big thing, entrepreneurs just as often make their marks by refreshing and improving earlier innovations. This can be seen in U.S. education today, where many of America’s most successful innovators — including the founders of the Knowledge in Power Program Public Charter Schools, the Great Hearts Academies and the Classical Charter Schools of America — built upon time-proven curricula (phonics-based reading, for example) and teaching methods to produce top-performing schools.
Our organization is attempting something similar. We’re using modern technology to help high school students — whether in traditional public schools, charter schools, private schools or home schools — better understand the ideas of liberty and a free society.
In addition to our five social studies textbooks (two volumes on U.S. history and one each on world history, economics and civics), we’re also offering a three-class-period online course on the American founding titled “The American Experiment: 250 Years of Enduring Principles.” The course is designed to deepen students’ understanding and appreciation of America’s foundational ideals as our country commemorates its 250th anniversary next year.
I’m often asked why the 4,200 teachers who use our texts and teaching materials need such aids, because most of them already have district-mandated textbooks. The answer is that most other textbooks focus on memory material — events, dates, institutions and people — while we focus on ideas and principles.
We don’t avoid uncomfortable topics, such as slavery. However, our content emphasizes that American history was shaped by broad struggles toward universally aspirational values we call American Principles.
As we explain in volume one of our U.S. history courses: Understanding American history is understanding “the exceptional and experimental ideas” upon which our country is based.
From its earliest days, the United States has depended on the kind of disruptive creativity that Schumpeter identified, the type of risk-taking described by Knight and the ability, of which Mr. Kirzner speaks, to zero in and act on opportunities others don’t see.
That’s the unremarkable and underappreciated story of America. It’s what propelled George Westinghouse and what will power America’s future.
• Richard Lorenc is president and CEO of Lexandria, a project of the education nonprofit Certell Inc. intended to help develop U.S. high school students into principled citizens.
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