This book now turns to Europe. Before considering how the United States influenced the development of entrepreneurship studies in France, Germany and the Czech Republic, however, something must be said about the reform of French and German commercial and engineering education after World War II. Educational conceptions about man and society that went back at least two hundred years anchored the institutions that underwent reform. D. Eleanor Westney, writing about the Westernization of Japan during the Meiji era (1868–1912), notes that “general attitudinal patterns” resist pressure to change more than specific organizational structures and functions (Westney, 1987, p. 219). This is only partially true, however, because “general attitudinal patterns” give life to an educational edifice that permits it to resist institutional change, especially when change undermines the “general attitudinal patterns.” Prior to evaluating American influence on higher education in the information age, it behooves us to consider how peculiar the French and German systems were in their origin and in their evolution through post-war reform.

This chapter, therefore, is background. It evaluates the European educational heritage, presenting it primarily as an alternative to the American – or, rather, as alternatives, for the systems differed from each other in the two countries almost as much as they did from the American. Again, historical sequence is important, since the educational systems that existed prior to the quickened interest in entrepreneurship evoked by phenomenal Silicon Valley determined to a great extent the desire and capacity to accept American views of entrepreneurship and the education integral to it.