Why CBSE, ICSE, and IB Boards Make Great Employees, but Rarely Entrepreneurs

In India, most schools use CBSE, ICSE, or IB boards. These systems help students get good grades, do well on standardized tests, and build strong resumes—perfect for getting a solid job in an office or company. They teach students to follow rules, work well in organized groups, and do what they’re told. This makes them excellent employees.

But if you want to become an entrepreneur—someone who starts businesses, takes risks, and creates new things—these school systems often don’t prepare you well. Being an entrepreneur means dealing with chaos, failure, and uncertainty. Those are not things you can learn from sitting in classrooms and memorizing textbooks.

How Schools Focus on Rules, Not Creativity

CBSE, ICSE, and even IB (which is supposed to be more creative) put a big focus on memorizing information, preparing for exams, and following a step-by-step path to success. For example, CBSE gets students ready for big entrance exams like JEE or NEET by making them solve a lot of similar problems. ICSE is known for its in-depth content, but it’s all about sticking closely to the curriculum. IB tries to encourage some curiosity, but at the end of the day, it’s still all about grades and assessments.

Why is it this way? The modern education system was designed long ago to make sure kids became good workers—people who would follow orders in factories or government offices. So, schools usually reward students who can memorize and repeat information, not those who can think creatively. Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy has said, “Our education system which focuses on learning by rote is not good for becoming entrepreneurs.”

Critics say this method kills creativity. Students learn to care more about job security and following the rules than about taking risks or coming up with new ideas. Even IB, the most “global” of the three, often acts just like the others in India, where exam scores are everything.

Why Many Entrepreneurs Avoid the System

If you look at India’s top startup founders, you’ll see a trend: the biggest risk-takers didn’t just follow the normal school path. Ritesh Agarwal (OYO Rooms) left college to create his famous hotel business and learned more from real-world experience than any class. Byju Raveendran (Byju’s) didn’t go to India’s top schools but still built a billion-dollar company, spotting weaknesses in the system he once navigated. Deepinder Goyal (Zomato) only realized the gap between his schooling and true entrepreneurship after he had started working.

This isn’t an accident. Many well-known entrepreneurs learned the most important lessons after school or outside of it—by starting side businesses, failing, and trying again. Yes, some famous people like Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata went to elite schools, but their real learning came from family businesses and real-world risks, not their school classes.

Globally, people like Elon Musk and Richard Branson talk about how they succeeded by ignoring the typical school system and learning on their own. In India, where startups have raised $140 billion since 2014, many unicorn founders admit they treated school as something they had to get through, not the source of their big ideas.

True Entrepreneurship Happens Outside Classrooms

You can’t really learn to be an entrepreneur from a textbook or in a tidy classroom. Entrepreneurship means dealing with chaos—pitching new ideas, struggling with a lack of money, and figuring things out as you go, sometimes failing badly. Our school boards usually provide safe, supervised environments which don’t teach this kind of real-life problem solving.

Alternative education models—like homeschooling, micro-schools, or “learning by doing” projects—are better at encouraging creativity and risk-taking. They let students try, fail, and try again, learning real problem-solving skills that help them start and run businesses. Research shows that being taught entrepreneurship helps people develop important skills not found in traditional classes: how to manage money, take risks, and adapt quickly.

In India, things are starting to change. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 encourages less memorization and more real learning, with millions supporting this shift. Blending some of IB’s open-mindedness with CBSE’s structure is a step in the right direction, but most schools still don’t give kids unsupervised space to actually build something or fail.

A Call to Action: Turn Schools Into Innovation Hubs

CBSE, ICSE, and IB are great for making future employees: engineers, office workers, and analysts who help India grow. But if we want more entrepreneurs—people who start businesses and change the world—we need to change how we teach. Real entrepreneurship grows outside safe classrooms, in the rough-and-tumble of real life where things don’t always go as planned.

It’s time for parents, teachers, and leaders to add real-life experiences to the syllabus. Let students try things, make mistakes, and figure things out for themselves. Only then will Indian schools move from making employees to making entrepreneurs—the kind who build something new, not just join what already exists.