For years, I have been a champion for entrepreneurship. But it is important not to oversell the “start your own business” element of this idea.

I don’t think that new businesses formed in Maine will, by themselves, be our state’s economic salvation. To my mind, entrepreneurship as an attitude and value, as a way of looking at life, is more important than entrepreneurship as textbook completion of the Kauffman Foundation’s three stages of entrepreneurship: inspiration, startup and building to scale. Becoming a state where the majority of the labor force is employed in businesses started here is not a reasonable – or even particularly desirable – goal. But becoming a state where the majority of the people in the labor force view themselves as entrepreneurs is both reasonable and highly desirable.

If we are to embrace such a goal, we could hardly do better than to examine and replicate the Flex Friday program at Baxter Academy, the 2-year-old charter school in Portland.

What Startup Weekend is for budding entrepreneurs, Flex Friday is for every Baxter student – pitch an idea, recruit collaborators, sell it to a panel of experts and turn it into an enterprise. The premise is simple, according to the Baxter program description: “Real life is about solving long-term problems, learning from failure, building on previous work, working with colleagues, design review and iteration, time and resource management.” And – the real nub of the problem – “none of these are possible within the constraints of a conventional school schedule.”

So with Flex Friday, Baxter breaks the constraints. Every year, each student must articulate an idea, gather fellow students as collaborators, prepare a project description (with schedules, financial requirements, outcomes and connections to learning), submit it to a faculty board for approval or revision and then spend a year of Fridays (and scads of extra time beyond Fridays at school) bringing that project to some completion.

I was fortunate to have been invited to experience a mid-year Flex Friday at Baxter several weeks ago. What a gift! While I was met at the door by the executive director, I was soon whisked away by my student guides and, at every stop, again whisked away by the members of whatever project we happened upon – 3-D printers, self-stabilizing bicycles, violin construction, wind turbine blades. I was continuously blown away by the boundless energy, the exuberant enthusiasm, the self-confident expressiveness and the voracious desire to hear reactions.

For generations, as both a parent and a grandparent, I have heard people (including myself) bemoan the transformation of happy, enthusiastic, eager to learn toddlers into sullen, grunting, “I dare you to reach me” adolescents.

For anyone who has ever expressed a similar sentiment, a visit to a Flex Friday at Baxter Academy would, I believe, be transformative. It certainly was for me. Mere minutes after dropping my 3-year-old grandson into the sea of eager smiling faces rushing to greet us and show us their favorite toys and games at his preschool, I was engulfed in the same enthusiastic wave of energy at Baxter. If, as Gallup research contends, entrepreneurship is basically about optimism, and if, as I believe, Flex Friday is basically about entrepreneurship, then expanding this form of education will go a long way toward addressing Maine’s economic woes.

Charles Lawton is chief economist for Planning Decisions Inc. He can be contacted at:

clawton@planningdecisions.com