Educating Leaders

I read it in the News & Observer. Peter Burian is holding his last class this Wednesday after 44 years teaching Classical Studies. As a teacher myself, I can identify. Let's hope they throw him a party. Beyond that, those of us concerned about leading schools and businesses would do well to reflect on what the Duke University professor was trying to do.

In this age of accountability and data-driven decision making, teaching 2,000 year-old Greek drama enters it into few educational leadership or business administration preparation-program curricula. If understanding ourselves and others, however, is a prerequisite for effective leadership, it should.

"There's something important about recognizing that people have been worrying about the same things, arguing about them, desperately trying to understand them, forever," Burian told reporter, Jane Stancill. That even the mighty ancient Greek warrior, Achilles, ultimately proved vulnerable should remind us of our own fragility as modern-age leaders. If anything, digital technology has rendered us even more vulnerable than our ancestors. Think about the last time your laptop crashed or the battery on your smart phone failed.

The fragility of the powerful is but one lesson the Classics, and more broadly, the Humanities teach us. "In the end, the kinds of human issues that we all face are identifiable," Burian said. The enduring truths of human behavior--avarice, pride, lust, envy, and yes, love, generosity, and hopefulness--are expressed through drama, art, music, poetry and literature. For a leader, spending significant time with the Humanities is time well-spent.

I count myself lucky to have been an academic grazer in my youth. I'm sure my parents did not appreciate what seemed to them lack of focus. In my undergraduate majors, I wandered from English to Journalism to Music Education. As a career, I considered the priesthood, the military, medicine, entertainment, and information science. In the end, I became a band director, school leader, educational researcher and writer, curriculum developer, college professor, and chief executive officer of my own company. My next career remains a secret even to me.

Through it all, I remembered, and continue to remember, the lessons of my high school teachers. They were what today we might call "purists." Each teacher taught as if their subject existed alone. If they collaborated at all, I am sure it was only to make my teenage life more miserable. My undergraduate professors were no different. Thanks to them, my address was the library with subsequent digs in the music studio. Yet, there is something to be said for their standards and their demands.

When I am King of the World, I think I will pass a decree for new standards. The decree will insist on a broad liberal education for every leader of everything that is led. There will be no data-driven decisions until the leader surfaces the truth driving the data. Decisions will ultimately be rendered in terms not of information but of knowledge and wisdom.

In my kingdom, standards are implemented by leaders who recognize that one size fits few. Standards are guided by the passion of individuals aspiring to meet a greater common good. There will be no failure because, having developed personal learning agendas, there is no way to fail. And educating leaders will be everybody's business because, in my Kingdom, everybody leads. Now somebody pass me my crown.