The founder of a curriculum company will pilot his program in some Oklahoma schools this year as he pitches it to other state education departments.
Faith Fiorello dreaded the thought of classrooms during summer recess, but her interest in dollars and cents and a heavier piggy bank quickly took over.
The 11-year-old came home each day and bombarded her mother, Kimberly Fiorello, with questions: Did you know the money you deposited doesn’t stay at the neighborhood bank? Did you know it’s used to build local businesses nearby and improve our community? Do you know why certain products cost so much? I know how to negotiate now, but do you?
Faith, of course, was quick to provide detailed explanations on every topic, sharing what she learned during a two-week Middle School MBA program at her school in Chattanooga, Tenn., and entering the sixth grade this month with visions of someday owning a business.
“I see money differently now,” Faith told The Epoch Times. “You don’t want to just spend it. You want to think about it. You have it for an amount of time. You learn how to value it more.”
John Rock Foster, who developed the Middle School MBA program, said his curriculum will be piloted at schools in the Oklahoma City area in the coming academic year, benefitting 400 students in grades 6–8.
If all goes well, he hopes to expand it and a similar program for high school students across the nation at the rate of 20,000 students annually.
“We bring reality into the classroom,” Rock Foster told The Epoch Times. “Basically, we show them how the world works.”
“Immediately, they become more serious about their schoolwork, and they behave like an adult.”
The curriculum, focused on business economics, is modeled after graduate school degree programs but scaled down to the appropriate age group and packed into modules of 30 classroom hours, Rock Foster said.
The Middle School MBA website indicates that students develop critical thinking skills as they learn about markets, free trade, business cycles, loans, retirement, how to balance a checkbook, ethics, price discovery, production, accounting, strategy, and other facets of capitalism.
The website says, “From the classroom to the boardroom.”
The uniqueness and notoriety of this program, Rock Foster added, are reflected in how readily it appears in ChatGPT queries.
