Perhaps you’ve noticed a growing enterprise occupying the time and energy of today’s young people. It’s called leadership training. This training begins sometimes as early as elementary school, increases in middle school, accelerates sharply in high school, and takes on a life of its own in college.
The sprawling collection of leadership programs, leadership workshops, leadership conferences, leadership awards, leadership scholarships, administered by leadership-training experts, armed with leadership manuals, following leadership best practices, now forms a fairly fecund industry, a “student-leadership industrial complex” if you will, or SLIC for short.
Instead of taking leadership training as an unquestioned good, we need to consider the ways that SLIC impedes student learning and can do harm in the world.
Considerable resources are expended by institutions that subscribe to and host SLIC programs and services, and by student participants to attend SLIC workshops and conferences. Many of the opportunities promise quick and seductive roads to mastering the steps to success — dress sharply, speak confidently, move smoothly, learn to network, pick up entrepreneurial skills. All of it requires an enormous investment of time.
Yes, for young women, racial minorities, and first-generation college students, this leadership training can be occasionally empowering and may give some of them opportunities to connect with one another and to network with mentors they may not otherwise have. In my experience, however, most students recruited into SLIC tend to be disproportionately drawn from advantaged backgrounds, picked for demonstrating the confidence and self-assurance of those raised on a “you are special” diet, and already better prepared to succeed than many of their peers are. These are the students who are then tracked into leadership programs and urged to assume leadership roles.
Tell students to embrace horizontal relationships of comradeship rather than vertical relations of hierarchy.
Regardless of the background of student-leader trainees, these programs are diverting young people’s attention away from investing in the kind of time-intensive, rigorous, well-rounded education that teaches them to read carefully, write compellingly, reason analytically, and think creatively. In fact, students from underprivileged backgrounds, for whom knowledge acquisition may well be the most important inheritance of higher education, are being especially ill served if such leadership training comes at the cost of a solid education.
The purpose of SLIC is to produce slick young leaders, by first identifying students who display “leadership qualities,” and then grooming them to become polished and confident leaders. My first tongue-in-cheek inclination is to tell a young person from a privileged background who has been identified as a “natural leader,” quite likely for displaying the qualities generally associated with authoritarianism (assertiveness, aggressiveness, hypermasculinity), that he should spend his life repressing rather than cultivating those traits.
More seriously, what I would like is for these students to question certain presuppositions about the “why of leadership” that are deeply embedded within the model of leadership training. I would ask them to consider the stakes of pursuing leadership as a goal and career. In doing so, my hope is that young, bright, socially well-positioned students will think more critically about the habits and practices of responsible citizenship, and the essential role that a well-rounded education plays in that endeavor.
The biggest problems facing the world — poverty, economic inequality, climate change, racism, sexism — are structural problems that require collective action to solve.
It is too easy to think that strong, smart, capable, charming leaders produced through leadership training can fix problems that are systemic in nature. If anything, what SLIC produces are more members of an elite class that has a vested interest in continuing the systems that put it at the top of the food chain. If a student aspires to be a leader, he may well become the problem he is trying to solve.
It is also worth remembering that the charge to “change the world” has a storied colonial pedigree, articulated in forms such as the white man’s burden, and the civilizing mission. The considerable resources devoted to leadership training in schools for colonial officers would have been much better spent on an education that cultivated a sympathetic awareness of the world.
So where does that leave us? If we don’t want students to aspire to be leaders, what should we suggest to them instead? To what ends and in what ways can privileged, enthusiastic, genuinely well-meaning young people muster their considerable intelligence, enormous energy, and legitimate grievances about the state of the world? Here are some ideas:
Tell them to get an education. An education is not a training that comes with a ready-made tool kit of leadership skills or a seven-step manual to fix the world. An education is the hard work of learning to read, write, and think in full and complex sentences. Reiterate the value of a good education. A well-rounded one. An education that teaches students to make an argument, with evidence. To distinguish fact from fiction, as well as be moved by good fiction. An education that unleashes our students’ creative energies. One that challenges them, makes them question their assumptions and beliefs, and most important, humbles them.
Show them how to care about the world around them. Give them permission to listen and learn from those who went unnoticed by SLIC, and who might offer insights they will never learn in SLIC. Teach them to revive the long academic tradition of outside-the-classroom study groups in which students learn about the pressing problems of the world through studying with and teaching one another — a form of “co-curriculum” and “learning community” far more worthy of their names than the anti-intellectual shiny versions being promoted by most colleges these days.
Warn them of the perils of being consumed by the hubris that comes from a life of entitlement. Advise your students that instead of trying to rise to the top through SLIC, they should struggle in solidarity with others. Tell them to embrace horizontal relationships of comradeship rather than vertical relations of hierarchy. If they are going to use their privilege, teach them to use it to speak truth to power, rather than aspire to become the power.
What if, despite their best efforts, some of these students find themselves as leaders, people whose wisdom is sought by, and life serves as an inspiration to, others? The good news is that then they would have emerged as leaders from the best kind of leadership training, a training in the struggles of life, work, and politics, and not in some highly paid consultants’ factory of slick leader-production. If they do become great leaders someday, it will not be because they chose leadership as a career.
Shampa Biswas is a professor of politics at Whitman College.
