David Engels
This is the third and final part of David Engels’ essay on leadership and education – please find here the first and second part.
3. Building Back Better Leadership
It is much easier to analyse and criticise a given situation than to propose a realistic alternative, even more so when the root of the problem lies not in single deficiencies, but a civilisational decline that most people do not even dare to acknowledge. Hence, renewal must remain extremely difficult at early educational stages influenced by collectively dysfunctional family structures and mass culture, so that only smaller private institutions retain partial freedom to cultivate alternative models. This is why any form of renovation, as long as it has no political leverage, can only start at such a very reduced and partial level.
Thus, we can think of educational communities encouraging sustained interaction between teachers and students beyond formal lectures and seminars in order to restore conditions favourable to imitation, mentorship and positive leadership. Indeed, intellectual formation deepens when academic life includes shared meals, cultural activities, debates or liturgy, allowing students to encounter authority embodied in lived personality and various contexts rather than mere abstract instruction, and emerging organically where education addresses the whole person rather than isolated competences.
Central to such renewal lies the recovery of a long-lost anthropological vision. Education inevitably communicates an image of humanity, whether acknowledged or concealed. Cultures confident in their continuity educate toward true spiritual excellence and a positive relationship with one’s roots; civilisations uncertain of their legitimacy, however, retreat into procedural neutrality or egalitarian utopias. Leadership formation requires the courage to affirm once again ideals such as wisdom, courage, moderation and justice — concepts increasingly regarded with suspicion within late-modern discourse. Without such orientation, educational systems may expand indefinitely while producing individuals hesitant to assume responsibility for collective destinies.
Such a recovery of anthropological clarity would necessarily entail a structured reintegration of leadership into the very fabric of education, and this reintegration would have to unfold along the classical axis of the abovementioned virtues.
In its theoretical dimension, leadership must first be assimilated to the virtue of wisdom. Young people ought to understand that leadership is neither charisma nor self-assertion, but the capacity to discern the good in concrete circumstances and to orient others toward it. This presupposes an intellectual formation going beyond the mere acquisition of the competences necessary in the field where leadership is to be exerted: what is needed is als an acquaintance with historical examples of statesmen, scholars, military commanders, founders, saints, reformers and cultural builders whose authority rested upon judgment and inner order. The study of such figures must go beyond superficial biography; it should include reflection upon their failures, their hesitations, their moral struggles, and the limits of their time. Leadership education at this level is therefore inseparable from the study of history, philosophy and literature, since these disciplines provide the memory and vocabulary through which prudence is formed. Wisdom matures when students learn to distinguish appearance from substance, impulse from responsibility, opinion from truth.
The second dimension concerns practice and corresponds to the virtue of courage. Leadership cannot remain a merely theoretical object of contemplation; it requires habituation through lived responsibility. Educational institutions should therefore create structured opportunities in which students alternately assume and relinquish authority. Seminar leadership, group projects, organised excursions, musical ensembles, athletic teams, charitable initiatives or academic societies provide concrete arenas in which young people learn to guide others, to make decisions under pressure, to accept accountability and to confront resistance without resentment. Equally important is the experience of responsible obedience. To follow well is already to exercise judgment, since obedience devoid of reflection degenerates into passivity, while obedience animated by loyalty and critical intelligence prepares for future command. Through such alternating roles, students discover that authority and service belong to the same moral continuum.
Finally, leadership education must be situated within a broader spiritual horizon corresponding to the virtue of moderation, as power detached from self-restraint inevitably hardens into domination. Young leaders must therefore be formed in the discipline of limits: limits of ambition, of self-exposure, of impatience, of vanity. This dimension cannot be transmitted through technique, it also presupposes contact with traditions that articulate ultimate ends beyond success or recognition. Reflection upon transcendence, exposure to liturgical or contemplative practices, engagement with enduring philosophical and theological questions remind the aspiring leader that authority is entrusted rather than possessed; Moderation safeguards the leader from becoming captive to the very structures he inhabits
Only when wisdom guides judgment, courage animates action, and moderation tempers ambition does leadership acquire its full anthropological integrity and can we hope to create once again a leadership ideal capable of building a truly just society. Education thus occupies a decisive civilisational frontier. The formation of leaders cannot be separated from questions of transcendence, cultural continuity and moral imagination. A civilisation capable only of transmitting information risks discovering that no generation feels prepared to guide the next. Leadership arises where individuals learn to subordinate personal ambition to enduring purposes, accepting responsibility for an entire community as vocation rather than opportunity. Whether Western societies retain the confidence required to educate in this spirit remains uncertain, hence, it is even more important that small, highly motivated educational institutions take over the initiative to create at least an efficient elite capable of protecting what is essential.