David Engels
We are very grateful to publish a short essay on leadership and education by Dr David Engels, member of the Lux Mundi Advisory Board, in three instalments – parts 2 and 3 will follow next week and the week after.
1. Introduction
Few notions occupy such a central place in contemporary educational discourse as that of ‘leadership’, and yet few realities appear so visibly eroded within Western societies and pedagogy. Educational programmes promise to form autonomous personalities capable of innovation and responsibility, universities advertise leadership academies, political rhetoric constantly invokes the necessity of new elites prepared to guide increasingly complex societies, and yet, at the same time, public life reveals a profound crisis of authority. Political representatives inspire little admiration, while intellectual figures rarely command moral respect, and institutional leaders often appear interchangeable administrators rather than personalities capable of orientation or sacrifice. This contradiction suggests that leadership cannot be reduced to long lists of transferable ‘competences’ and that its gradual disappearance reflects a deeper anthropological transformation. The problem confronting education today therefore concerns less methodology than the question of what kind of human being modern institutions still dare to form.
Historically, leadership never emerged from procedural training alone. Authority rested upon character, and character presupposed a moral and spiritual framework within which action acquired meaning. Every durable civilisation educated its elites according to an implicit hierarchy of values linking personal discipline to transcendent purposes. Whether expressed through classical Greco-Roman virtue ethics, Christian anthropology or Confucian piety, leadership implied responsibility before something higher than mere individual success, as the leader embodied continuity between truth, goodness and action. Modern education, increasingly hesitant to affirm substantive conceptions of the good, attempts instead to cultivate neutral ‘competences’ adaptable to fluctuating civilisational demands and always apologetically put into a rhetoric context of egalitarianism and social justice.
Yet leadership detached from moral orientation and hidden behind the smokescreen of an alleged common good gradually dissolves into management, persuasion or technical optimisation. One may coordinate processes efficiently without inspiring confidence or loyalty, and societies governed exclusively through procedures eventually lose the capacity for collective direction – or experience the slow transfer of true leadership and power from a public space where it can evolve under the critical eye of the citizens to more elitist and secluded backrooms…