Authority and ego in teaching . . . and the cult of leadership

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Conventional schooling and teaching creates a form of authority incompatible with education. Authority needs to be won, but if it isn’t, it will be imposed. Not only does this corrupt the educational relationship, it produces undesirable ego issues, because “education” becomes something that we “do” to other people, and our “success” involves appropriating some of their achievement to ourselves. These problems are shared in the widespread cult of leadership, where leadership, partly defined by “followership” is imposed, and departs from the natural ways in which equals step up for each other

Authority and ego in teaching

. . . and the cult of leadership

The teacher-learner relationship serves educational processes poorly because it centres on an interaction between two “outsides” at the expense of an engagement with experience – most notably the experience of the learner. The heart of agency lies in the internal, and it is created, sustained or diminished through the interaction of internal and external that is characteristic of experience. The prospect for the educational becomes very much worse, however, once teaching is institutionalised and situated in conventional schooling.

It becomes worse because of two factors that come together; the nature of the compulsion involved, and the nature of authority. “Compulsory education”, which might better be replaced by a form of protection and defence of the educational space for the young in their dependency and vulnerability has, in our conventional “educational” thinking, been reduced to “compulsory schooling”, and this compulsion to engage in schooling comes down – most of the time – to being compelled to be in a class and a classroom, or something akin to it and similarly structured – even (for instance) when it is transferred outdoors.

In that classroom, the  compulsion is to participate in a teacher-learner relationship, but the final authority to teach, which comes with considerable coercive power, no matter how velvet the glove, is not conferred by the learner. It is conferred by the external and mostly invisible powers that hired the teacher. It is the nature of this authority that conditions this teacher-learner relationship between two “outsides”, making the ambiguity over the “interior” of the student much more problematic than it might be in other teacher-learner relationships. The authority is external to the learner, coming from powers external even to the teacher, and in the light of these prevailing external interests, the “interior” of the learner is often simply a frustration and a nuisance to all the other parties.

The authority to teach

In order to gain a clear picture of our problem here, we can benefit by considering teaching under more natural conditions. We will consider two contexts of “natural” teacher-learner relationships, both of which have almost certainly existed from the beginnings of the species – from long before it had ever occurred to anyone to “authorize” the relationship externally.

The first form of teaching is natural and consensual – I refer to it as natural, because it is so ordinary and ubiquitous as to often go unnoticed. The second is the range and complexity of teaching relationships that arise in natural care-giving relationships, by which we would usually mean between parents and children in family contexts, in contrast to those that are formally arranged. The complexity and variety in these parent-child, teaching-and-learning relationships, evolving as they do over time, can make the professional and “evidence-based” claims for teaching expertise in the narrowly contrived setting of schooling-and-teaching, with its external authority and limited developmental perception, seem, in contrast, quite primitive.

Natural, consensual teaching

“Can you show me how to do that, then?”

“I have never really understood that, would you explain it to me?”

“So how do I resolve this?”

In sincere cases like these, a number of interesting things happen at the same time. First, is an acknowledgement that someone else knows something we want to know. Secondly, we are not only requesting their help, we are conferring on them an authority to teach from their better knowledge. [1]

With that goes an acknowledgement of our willingness to be vulnerable, open and receptive to them – to learn something specific from them, and to comply with suggestions they may feel fit to make. Just how willing we are, how far we are prepared to go and to comply, how much effort we will invest, how far the authority will extend, and over how much time; all of these will depend upon a lot of things about the circumstances. Frequently we both know enough of the context and circumstances to be in rough agreement about the limits without even having to discuss them.

High among the relevant considerations will be the importance, to us, of the thing we want to learn, how extensive we perceive the other person’s knowledge to be, and the trust in them that we have come to have. Of course the one we look to as the teacher will also have to be willing to accept the authority and undertake what this tacit contract will involve.

This authority to teach might only extend for a few seconds. With a trusted friend, it might pass back and forth between us several times in a single conversation. Or it might be enduring. Our neighboring farmer may, over several months, help us to set up the farm we have just taken over. Or it might occur with a shop-assistant, a mechanic, our doctor, or someone on the street when we ask directions. Unless we are dour, reclusive and unsocial, we are probably always teachers, as well as learners from teachers, and generally do pretty well at either. But then we don’t have to do this under conditions of compulsion, bad motivation, grading, and remotely determined and one-sided agendas.

More than this, in many of the circumstances in which this teaching occurs, it is among friends and acquaintances who know us better than a classroom teacher who has thirty students for a year. The varying degrees of that familiarity have a lot to do with the extent to which this exterior-to-exterior transaction can take account of the interiors. It is usually a one-on-one relationship, and it may well be with someone we know well and trust, and who may have quite a good sense of our beliefs, values and convictions. Were we to try to build a genuinely educational system, we would do well to build on these intimacies as much as we can.

Teaching in the parent-child relationship

Teacher-learner relationships are “messy” in the relationships between parents and children in ways that are radically oversimplified in formal schooling. Indeed, we might even say that the more sophisticated and educational the parent-child relationship, the messier it is. We should not be making comparisons here with family settings that are deeply problematic, of course. At this end of the spectrum, the context of origin in which a child begins may be so lacking in stable rules, routines and habits that children find it difficult to find their feet in life at all. At worst, too, they can be so violent and unpredictable that the life of a child can come to an early end. Environments of emotional incontinence and unpredictability can result in cycles of slavery to passion, and an inability to learn to delay gratification. In such circumstances, and where communication is impoverished and words serve as weapons, it is hard for the development of reason to gain a grip.

But here we are trying to learn from the complexities and paradoxes of teaching authority in circumstances where children might be expected to flourish. One thing that must be highlighted here, is that we are considering a situation in which the offspring in parental care is always in transition. It is undergoing continual developmental change from birth to adult independence.

To make matters more complex (and sometimes overlooked), the parent⁄caregiver too, is going through their own development and life-change as this period is covered – not just in dealing with the changing circumstances in their parenting role, but in the living of their own lives. To add even more complexity, the nature of the authority is also undergoing change as this development occurs. It must do.

In the beginning, it is undertaken by parent-to-child with total authority and responsibility being on the side of the parent. Along the way, the authority may become more reasoned – from “reason giving”, at first, where the reasons are given for what is going to happen anyway, to a more gradually negotiated form of reason, but where the parent figure still sets final boundaries. If there is any intellectual and emotional sensitivity on the parental side at all, the parent will, in this process, have begun to learn from the child, and this appreciation of their reasoning will gradually increase. Ultimately, if full agency is to be achieved, there will be a free granting of teaching authority, and either way, just as it might be among friends.

That process, as among friends, can be under way remarkably early – while strong conditions of care-giver responsibility are still, of necessity, in place. It is remarkable what very young children can teach willing parents. I have known respectful parents to change their lives after listening to a child whose remarks challenged what they had taken for granted. But at the other end of the spectrum there are, of course, parent-child relationships in which the teaching authority initially assumed by parents over their infants is presumed to continue for the rest of their lives.

The authority of the classroom teacher

In contrast, professional teachers are exercising their teaching authority in a window of their student’s lives that is very narrow in two basic respects. Firstly, it is confined to the time that the student is in attendance inside a formal schooling institution. That is only a portion of the students’ lives, and though teachers do often enough see themselves as “mopping up” from the rest of life, as students come to school cold, hungry, tired and emotionally destabilised by events at home; so too, parents out in the real world are frequently mopping up in much the same way after things have not gone too well at school. There are, of course, differences of intimacy and support here when teachers are dealing with (perhaps) thirty or forty students, and parents are dealing with numbers in a family proportion. At secondary school, and at college, we are down to a few hours per week in which the teacher is even in the presence of specific learners.

But in addition to this, generally teachers only have students directly in their care for a year or two at most. They simply do not experience each learner from the fragile dependency of birth, to the full exercise of equal moral adulthood. In one of my courses on indoctrination, as student teachers began to take the possibility of harm seriously, one remarked that surely she could do little harm – she “only had them for a year”. Given such considerations, it is thought-provoking to witness the not-uncommon teacher contempt for parents, in comparison with their own sophisticated educational professionalism.

Though many teachers form bonds of affection, the exercise of their responsibilities of care-giving cannot, and should not, expect to have such additional emotional fuel to motivate consideration for the interests of the child. After all, genuine affection can’t be hired, and there should be no expectation that it should. All that they can be expected to have is the principled and affective motivation that respect for others can provide, focussed by the teaching contract. Unlike parents, however, they have their responsibilities to their employers to consider, and these may not always be congruent with respect, given the institutional purposes of conventional schooling.

The final and overriding authority that they possess does not lie within teacher autonomy at all. It is external. They were hired to do this by powers remote from each child, and that persist in the sphere of the teacher as each child comes and goes. “Winning” authority may make their efforts easier, but it cannot be required if the compulsion of the classroom is to be maintained – as it always is for those who are not to be won over easily.

This puts teachers in an entirely different situation to the parent where the authority to teach is concerned. However misguided the parent may be, the authority to teach always lies between parent and child. Though the community may want to hold a parent responsible for failing to teach, there is no real equivalent, for a parent, to sending the student to the principal, and nor is there the standard possibility of exclusion, short of breaking up families themselves.

Where it comes to viewing the great chain of authority, I grew up in a world quite different from today, of course. I read avidly as a child, but I didn’t read newspapers until I was well into my teens. There was no TV, and political behaviour and scandal, when it did come into my world, was reported with considerable circumspection. Compared with how we live today, there was a very high degree of congruence and sense of legitimacy that flowed from the authority of the teacher upward and outward throughout authority in the wider community, right into the most foundational political institutions and practices. Families debated party politics, but there was, nevertheless, a widespread sense that the constitutional and political systems that we lived under – and as they were practiced (at least for the most part) – were expressions of good will and intent.

Of course this was an incredibly naive world. It concealed profound racism, gender discrimination, and class arrogance and contempt. It concealed scandalous behaviour and corruption and cover-up. It concealed all kinds of hypocrisies and abuses of power. It concealed these things well for the child growing through school. We might hate things about it all, but these were clearly our people doing the best that we had all been able to achieve.

Compare this with our current situation, however. While the child is faced with a teacher who controls their lives with an authority derived remotely, requiring them to teach and assess according to agendas determined equally remotely, that remote structure of authority plays itself out vividly in its hypocrisy, corruption, combativeness and deceit (and even hatefulness) transparently across the shoulders of the teacher of any child who has access to an internet connection or a TV set. The teacher represents that authority, and “what it stands for”. If children don’t access these public displays of authority directly, very many of their peers will. These profound and vivid hypocrisies are now an inevitable common lore – a part of the perceived logic of authority itself. And, of course they are accompanied with enormous confusion about what is true; a good deal of it induced deliberately, and known to be.

The teacher is the closest representative of that institutional authority which is not the learner’s own, and quite different from the authority of parents, who are frequently wrestling with the conditions of that official world themselves. It is hard to imagine how political and institutional authority could fail to have a question mark behind it; a question that I would not have been able to conceptualise until I was a decade or more older than the students who now confront it daily.

At the same time, the learner is offered nothing that would enable them to interrogate authority-claims effectively and intelligently for themselves, and to confer their own authority in any satisfactory way – not politically, morally or in terms of personal and well-considered knowledge and belief, because to do so would compromise the agendas of schooling itself. The developmental contradiction of authority is now a profound one. It is intrinsic to schooling, and young minds must find ways of resolving such evident conflicts as they may.

The problem of the teaching ego

The idea that education is something we “do to” other people sets up conditions that can encourage an inappropriate ego problem in the would-be “educator”. Because education is thought of as something that we do to other people, we are readily seduced into entertaining agendas for them that are ours, or those of our employers, or (with pernicious vagueness) the agendas of “society”, rather than those who will be subject to our ministrations. This can, of course, be a result of that “creep” that is inclined to occur when we engage in deciding for others – we begin to decide more than we are entitled to ethically, taking advantage of their vulnerability because of our own agendas, and this can be evidenced in a willingness to take more responsibility for the outcome of learning than should be educationally appropriate.

As a consequence, we can easily make mistakes about whose achievement it is when a learner makes educational progress. If we are right, and we have much to be proud of, then it might be the case that we are misunderstanding our educational role, and elevating agendas of our own, or those who hire us.

My concern here is with the age-old way in which teachers appear to think (and perhaps are taught to think) of the intrinsic satisfactions of teaching. The satisfaction so often revolves around “what I did”. I “opened their eyes”, I “moved them past a major learning obstacle”, I “inspired in them a new interest”. “Job done”. Here, I changed a life. Here, I was able to save a child from some doom, to see what they were capable of, and to set them on the path to success. I saw it in their eyes. I saw it in their new energy and enthusiasm. They quite like me now.

It is gratifying, years later, when we meet them and they express appreciation for our efforts, or for the pleasure of being in our classes. Of course there is a peculiarity in this encounter – we now meet each other eye-to-eye as equals, and to them, we may well seem remarkably ordinary and approachable after all – even somewhat vulnerable – and with that old authority now diminished. Neither of us had ever anticipated such encounters with their transformations – as parents might of children, or children of parents.

Teachers struggle with a widespread contempt for their profession. Some of this no doubt springs from very common and not very pleasurable experiences of schooling, which many adults have been glad to put behind them. Some of this no doubt also comes from deep suspicions about the nature of the professional expertise that teachers are supposed to possess. After all, a good deal of this expertise may have more to do with negotiating the artificial constraints that they have to work under as they comply with the conditions of schooling – playing their part in a schooling factory – than it has to do with anything that is natively true about effectiveness in teaching. Teaching, after all is a common and natural practice in any culture. Whenever we professionalise such natural, human undertakings, the undertakings themselves are apt to be degraded in our appreciation, and judged suspiciously from the standpoint of their formal institutionalisation.

No doubt some of this is heightened by the sense that there is nothing really to understand about education anyway, because if it was important, and it mattered, they would have taught us about it in school – school supposedly being about the important stuff, and we were embedded in it at the time. Given the numbers of teachers any “modern” society needs, it can hardly be rocket science, or brain surgery.

Teaching, as a practical field, is not widely considered something that one would enter or study to expand one’s own intellect. It is a very lightweight field indeed, compared with almost any other field that appears to matter, and university students, including teacher education students, are pretty well aware of this. It is unfortunate that this perception of teaching gathers up with it the very idea of education as well.

And so teachers are poorly paid – to the point that in some Western countries teachers hold down two jobs to make ends meet. They put in extraordinary hours – nights and weekends and vacations of grading and preparation, though the public only perceives the shorter school day, and the long “holidays”. They are criticised if they go on strike, inconveniencing the baby-sitting (which is, of course, another of their functions where all parents have to work). How dare they! They are ruining young lives! They are supposed to be dedicated, and professionals! Professionals would not do such things!

Regardless of the contempt itself, teachers – like nurses, but unlike senior managers and CEOs – are expected to receive part of their compensation in intrinsic satisfaction. Teaching, apparently, is rewarding in itself. We get so much out of just being allowed to do it. So what is this satisfaction, this warm glow that we take home at the end of our day, in lieu of pay? “Compensation” that doesn’t pay the rent.

This satisfaction that we are supposed to look for is ideological, however. It is generated by the way that the schooling institution itself is constructed, and by the importance of the role of the official teaching within it.  Given how the agendas of schooling are developed, and that we are hired to fulfill, we are expected to take responsibility for achieving quite specific (and frequently “measurable”) things with our students, and where we are successful at this, we would look to acknowledgement of this from our peers and managers. We are, after all, held accountable for it, evaluated – even “inspected” – on it. We equate our own achievement with the success of the apparent missions of schools – which means that we are accountable for what we do to students; for the changes that we bring about in them.

In the schooling-and-teaching community there is even a fervour, and a wound-up anxiety about the “educational” mission of schooling-and-teaching that has almost a religious quality – giving substance to Ivan Illich’s claim that the school had become the modern day secular church. Schooling is something that one must be committed to, and the practical commitment is very similar to the saving of souls, in terms of what one is attempting to do for the sake of their lives. “Souls” are “lost”, “found”, “turned around”. Teachers are a secular clergy. There are church elders. There are bishops. There are cardinals.

The noble sense of what we are trying to “do to them” is often profound, deep, and passionate. We respond eagerly to brief but inspiring slogans about education itself, as we might apply these unexaminable descriptions to our marching banners – the high-minded ideals of people like Nelson Mandela, or Jefferson, or Madison, or Lincoln about how vital education is to democracy and freedom – ideals that might indeed be congruent with a genuine education, but are completely at  odds with the institution in which we have chosen to work and have come to represent.

Whether a genuine education could be the basis of freedom, prosperity, harmony, justice, reason and a viable planet may be an open question. But schooling as we have it can never be. Do not raise these questions. Do not point to the inconsistency between our banners and our practice. Do not wonder at the Emperor’s clothes. These things are not to be spoken of. We don’t have those books in our staffrooms. There is heresy in criticising the institution of schooling.

The idea that education is something that we “do to” people is now deeply rooted and widespread, so that the idea of “self-education” is a very derivative thing. We might “have a go at it” on our own, but the expectation is that, if we want the serious stuff, we need to submit ourselves to the appropriate institutions – the ones that “do it to us”. “Self education” would have to be a weak and poorly organised thing, prone to error and superficiality. Nevertheless when we finally leave school, we are often so glad to put education behind us, even if we acknowledge little ability to do it for ourselves.

It is therefore hardly surprising that, if we are to gain some intrinsic satisfaction from our teaching – as we need to (in view of the exhausting effort and hours we are expected to put in) then it will involve appropriating some of the success of our learners as our own personal success. Surely we have had some hand in this! It would be some sort of dereliction on our part if we didn’t. Here is where the problem of ego arises. I did this to them. Look what I did?

But if we are not going to appropriate to ourselves the successes of our learners in fulfilling the agendas of others, what sort of intrinsic satisfaction might there be in creating genuine educational situations? A proper educational satisfaction would have more to do with creating circumstances in which others can make up lives and minds that are genuinely their own, for themselves, rather than in fulfilling some expectations that we have for them – our hopes and dreams for them. It would, indeed, parallel the satisfaction that a good democratic citizen should have for their active participation in a democracy.

Our satisfaction should not lie in what we are able to make of them, but in the privilege and stimulation and wonder that we have access to while working and living among them as they create and recreate their own lives and the society in which they choose to live – doing it for themselves. It should be a humbling and appreciative experience, because of what they make happen. Our job is to bring them together in a proper spirit of good will, and to lend them a hand in clearing the thickets that entangle them, and lie ahead of them; not to make them into something, or make something of them.

There is a peculiarity here about the conventional teacher satisfaction that should help to highlight the difference. Few teachers can have the intrinsic reward of saving the souls of whole classes. Where such teachers exist – who “turn around” or “inspire” whole classes, changing the lives of them all; they are the rare few to be celebrated. They are given awards and dinners; for this sort of stuff is uncommon and unexpected – and rightly so given the enormous scale of the “education” industry and its widely recognised ineffectiveness.

We only need to reflect for ourselves on how many such “outstanding” teachers we had in our own journey through schooling. This shouldn’t be surprising. It is a mass, factory system, and the results are the results we should expect from a formal institutional system struggling with the mass processing of awkwardly diverse raw materials on such a scale.

Hence the best that most teachers can look for, in terms of intrinsic satisfaction of this kind, is the occasional compensatory success that runs counter to the run of this mass production based on a false and artificial motivation. Quite oddly, the satisfaction of the teacher must be personalised in the success of the specific and rather occasional learner who breaks some mould (those few individuals whose souls are actually saved) for which the teacher grabs some personal satisfaction, a credit they feel entitled to grab as they represent all those external agendas.

Compare this with the creation of an environment in which learners are resourced, equipped and brought together to take charge of their own education arising from their own motivation – their existing agendas being developed, increasingly by them, into larger, more powerful and more thoughtful agendas.

Our satisfaction should now arise from the effectiveness of the environments, opportunities and possibilities that we create and maintain for them all – environments that we should equally want others to support and encourage for ourselves – rather than from the satisfaction of agendas that we have for them. We get to enjoy the sheer pleasure of participating with them and learning so much more about our own good lives and social possibilities through being on the edge of their enquiries into questions that are never jaded for us either. We are allowed to listen in, and be surprised. We are allowed to discover just how smart they really are.

Our reward should also arise from the ways in which learners come to take over these activities; from the general effectiveness of larger social processes that learners come to run for themselves as communities. As we are successful in our own efforts with the social processes we help to create, our concern should be for any who aren’t rising naturally in these contexts, and for tweaking the social conditions to supply what is missing so that they can rise as well – so that there is an environment in which these too can flourish, but not because of what we feel obliged to “do to” them. To the extent that we have to “do learning to them”, we have to see our efforts as flirting with failure to achieve the educational conditions we aspire to, because “doing it to them” should conflict with our aspirations for their own agency.

We do not need isolated, individual, highly personalised satisfactions from this. Instead our satisfaction should be diffuse – from the abundance and diversity of such developments – not because what we do to them is “soul-saving”, but because we create conditions for communities of learners in which souls can flourish naturally and normally. Remarkably, instead of being as “individualistic” as the personal satisfaction of a teacher in a schooling factory must be, we will get our satisfaction from creating intelligent communities based on the richness of diversity that already exists, and that is allowed to take charge of itself, to thrive and evolve .

The parallel here would be in our effort, as democratic citizens, to create and sustain a genuine democracy. Our satisfaction should lie in doing so, from our convictions and commitments just as democratic citizens. Our pleasure should be in seeing that the democracy we labour to sustain is, indeed, working.

This is quite different from using democracy, with integrity, to promote some worthy cause. We should delight when people do so, and as they exemplify the virtues of democracy in the process. But their success should not be the source of our satisfaction. We should have that satisfaction regardless of whether their cause appeals to us or not, and even if it is, our satisfaction should not be dependent upon our direct intervention, as a teacher’s satisfaction is thought to be. If we can’t gain satisfaction simply from creating, maintaining and refining the democratic process for all, then we are not democrats, and perhaps the cause of democracy is lost.

The cult of leadership

“Leadership” has become a great preoccupation over quite a number of recent decades. Certainly enthusiasm for “leadership” would justify us at least in calling it a movement. It is indeed, tempting to call it a “cult”, given the breathless claims for it, and even the styles in which it is advocated. There is an abundance of gurus eager to consult and teach on its behalf, and the numbers of people who wish to be leaders, and see themselves as visionaries, could, given the rhetoric of leadership, be somewhat alarming, compared with the excitement of those who want to be followers. It is hard to see exactly where the source of its popularity lies without considering some disturbing questions that echo our problems with ego and teaching.

Much of what is advocated is simply confusing and confused, conceptually. The enthusiasm for pulling such a wide variety of relationships into the ambit of “leadership” speaks to that conceptual confusion, and instead of creating new and  liberating forms of leadership – as they so often announce themselves – these eager innovations frequently appear as confusions with other, more natural processes that needn’t be thought of in terms of leadership at all. Many of the virtues that are extolled as the virtues of good leaders should be quite commonplace – the sorts of virtues that have traditionally been thought of as essential qualities, simply, in a good person who respects their fellows.

For our purposes, it is enough both to point out that much that comes forward in the cult of leadership appears to generate new and unnecessary problems of ego and arrogance, even trading on, and fuelling, egotistical ambitions that may already exist, and that – given our discussion of the problem of ego in formal institutionalised teaching – it is hardly surprising that teachers are asked to think of themselves as leaders as well. Leading is also something we “do to” other people, apparently, and hence, no matter how nicely we want to paint it, it inevitably creates problems for the equality of human agency. It also collides head-on with much of the value of democracy, and undermines our appreciation of what democracy might require of us all.

The problem of leadership parallels our problem of teaching in another way. In natural settings, leadership, like teaching, can arise freely and consensually. It can be swapped, or fade away without even being noticed, and agency need never be compromised by any of the parties. Formalising it within institutions is another matter. Here the authority, as with teaching, is likely to be external, and it is here that agency and ego are likely to become problematic.

Whatever we want to do to “prettify” the idea of leadership, it is clear that, like teaching, it involves a binary relationship. Just as, for someone to teach, there must be a learner or pupil who submits to the teaching, so, for there to be a leader, there must be one or more people who are to be led. For there to be leaders, there must be followers. The dangers for ego and agency are immediately present in the very nature of this relationship.

Leadership in natural settings

“You do it”, I said, so she stepped forward, and I stood ready to back her up.

But it wasn’t going well, and as it unfolded, I had a thought. I stepped in and she stood aside, watching us both to see how she could help. Afterwards, we both laughed, pleased with what we had achieved. Except for our pleasure in recounting the tale, there was no thought to privilege who had done what. We were in this together. We had each “led” and “followed” as we might have in a dance, but as equals, with equal agency; never compromised.

I am tired when I get home. My partner settles me on the couch, with a drink, and gets dinner. I acquiesce. My mind is even too dull to think about it. I’m certainly not going to argue.

We talk about it. He’ll look after the kids, and I will back his decisions and help where I can. We clarify the sorts of decisions that might need to be made that will need joint attention, and how I can still be involved properly. That will free me to look for a job, and he will work to clear the way for me to do that, and work his routines around what my eventual job may require. We plan how we are going to be able to spend time together.

Not only does this natural flowing back and forth of mutually consensual authority between equals resemble the natural exchange of informal teaching authority discussed above; it may even be a more common feature of everyday life than informal teaching. We might even say that it is the basis of any genuine friendship, and the equality of respect is the key to it.

Even children do this from as early as they are able to play together, and it is instructive that renegotiating the rules is often an important and continuous part of it – particularly when there is a sense that anyone is getting above themselves.

When we get to the point where we have to say that we need to build a curriculum to develop leadership, or a programme or university department to promote it, then we might begin to wonder if this is a signal of social collapse. Another explanation, however, is that the problems of leadership arise when the authority for the leadership is like the authority for formal teaching; when it comes from the outside, and is imposed upon those who are to be designated the followers, regardless of their better judgment. Then we have to struggle against the moral and psychological tensions we have created.

That is a recipe for ego, for arrogance, for fuelling all the problems if conditional self-esteem explored in chapters 3 and 4. Your value to the undertaking is conditional upon mine. It is my job to lead you – to do it to you. That is why I was appointed and you were not. It is my vision that is to be implemented, and all I have to do is get you to embrace it. Since you may not immediately be keen on that, it is my job to motivate you. And though I will be magnanimous about “our” success, it will, in the end, count as my achievement. Yes, we might need a curriculum, a programme, a consultant or a university department to make that turn out well.

The “Love model” revisited

It is important, I think, to return to our earlier discussion of respect in order to understand the natural conditions of leadership, because these are the conditions against which all other attempts to contrive leadership should be measured – just as the nature of formal teaching should be tested against teaching as it occurs naturally outside institutions set up formally and officially to institutionalise it. Having just called it “natural leadership”, however, I am going to abandon the “leadership” terminology as far as I can, since these natural processes are not the focus of the cult of leadership, and we should not be trying to see natural leadership through the overwhelming eyes of that cult. “Taking initiative”, “stepping up”, “doing one’s part” may well serve us better.

The reason for this is to enable us to look at these relationships in which agency is preserved for all parties, and to keep this view fresh, recognising how widespread its implications should be. A key problem here is that the “leader⁄follower” dichotomy is accompanied by a long history of disrespect. It is tied into ideas of social hierarchy and privilege that go back thousands of years, and it is heavily freighted with contempt, rather than respect. Traditionally, whole classes of people were leaders or followers by accident of birth. The scorn of leadership is well-known, and the modesty of leadership is something to be viewed with suspicion. There is a falseness to the humility of the person who is “born to lead”, but becomes a self-effacing “servant of the people”.

In our time this is all much more meritocratic. Genes and hard work. People, it seems, are still born to lead, and some come to “deserve” to be the leaders of others by meritocratic engineering. Hence, as we introduce the idea of leaders-and-followers into situations where equal agency is supposed to be maintained, we are apt to introduce invidious tension and contradictions simply because of the traditional freight that the dichotomy sustains.

Arrangements should be reasonable from the points of view of all who are parties to the arrangement.

Once you have accepted the benefits of the arrangement, you must do your part.

Our consent to the arrangement must be free; our reason uncoerced. It must not be the product of indoctrination. Once we have agreed to the arrangement as being beneficial from our own point of view, on condition that it is so for the other participants as well, then “doing our part” will involve both the specific part that we have agreed to play, and also the circumstances of the agreement itself; to the maintenance of the conditions necessary for the agreement to be carried through.

That is, it is not just that it is our job to supply the eggs that we agreed to supply, it is also to stand by the other participants so that their ability to participate is not undermined by anything else we might do in and around the arrangement, or might not do to enable it to be carried through. Our commitment is not just to our specific role in the arrangement – supplying the eggs – but also to the arrangement itself.

Thus, at any time, and in any way, it might be that we have to step up to fix something, or make something happen to enable the arrangement to be fulfilled as agreed by all parties. There might, for instance, be a run on the banks. What can we do to help enable our agreement to hold together? We all have to be prepared to exercise such initiative. That is our responsibility as equals, and to each other. We have an obligation of care for the arrangement itself, and the terms under which it came into being.

In the same way, we owe each other support when others among us see a problem and take reasonable initiatives to enable the arrangement to work. The limit of our support will be where these initiatives might violate other respectful arrangements – when there is some moral breach, or legitimate law broken, or what is now being asked of us is patently unreasonable.

This account is, I think, consistent with those natural cases that I listed at the beginning of this section. In almost any arrangement, there are circumstances where any of us might need to “step up”, or “take initiative” to ensure that it works. It is not for us just to follow along, bagging the crumbs for ourselves, or depending on others to fix everything up for us.

There may, of course, be divisions of labour that need to be made in order to enable the undertaking to be carried through, particularly if it has some scale and endurance. And where a division of labour is agreed, then we each may have to lend a hand to those who have consented to take charge of any particular aspect.

It makes little sense, and is indeed harmful, to discuss this in leader⁄follower terms. The division of labour is better understood as a division of management, or organisation, which does not carry the moral freight that “leader⁄follower” does. Cooperative divisions of labour among equals, and “lending each other a hand” when needed, may do just as well, while retaining the necessary mutuality of respect. When we parcel out the tasks among ourselves, we want to arrange things so that we can all pitch in, and minimize second-guessing each other. When we ask someone to manage something, or organise some aspect of our joint project, we must equip them to manage or organise, and lend our support in other ways. Here we can lead and follow – by mutual consent.

Consider also the whole idea of “leading by example”, which is somehow supposed to mute the imperious, hierarchical, command structure of leadership and followership. When “leaders” lead by example, they get their hands dirty. They stoop. This is partly to show that they are just normal human beings like the rest of us. Their great status, wisdom and intelligence is to be humanised, so that the artificial gulf that the very idea of leadership has created is partially bridged – but not too much. They only dally in the trenches; only briefly dirty their hands. But at least they are not above doing so.

There we are, a group of equals, faced with a desperate problem. “Why don’t we just move the rocks?” I suggest. Nobody picks up on my idea. The debate goes on.

I step forward and start shifting the rocks. Am I leading by example? But nobody joins me, and eventually I have to abandon my effort. Did my attempt to lead by example just fail? But why talk about leadership here at all anyway? The difference between my suggestion that we move the rocks, and my going forward and attempting to do it, may be no more than a shift from verbal to physical advocacy within a context of equality.

“When I blow the whistle, men, go over the top and advance on the enemy (while I remain here in the trench)!” Having other people do things that you are not prepared to do yourself is surely a vice, but that doesn’t turn doing what you would have others do into a noteworthy virtue. If doing the thing is the right thing to do, then do it. When you endanger other people, isn’t sharing that danger simply a part of being ethical? Do unto others . . .

The basic point here is that those natural and ubiquitous arrangements where any of us might step up – or down – under conditions of equal respect hardly need any sophisticated “leadership theory”, let alone the cultivation of “leadership ability”. It is amazing to hear this happening when people advocate the idea that “everyone should be a leader”. It is as if we have lost touch, not only with the concept of leadership, but with any sort of basic social life in which people normally engage in all kinds of collective undertakings ruled by mutual respect – from cooking, to play, to sex.

Of course we may be killing off natural social life by spending more and more of our lives under the formality of school, robbing our students of the capacity to “step up”, just as we may be robbing them of natural contexts in which to informally teach. The more of our lives that we spend in school, the less time we have in which to learn and practice such natural things. Having done this, we may then fall into the trap of trying to restore what we are destroying by developing a “programme” to fix it. Some very peculiar things are being done to “play” these days for instance. It is being “assessed”. It apparently needs to be managed, and vocationalism is now advocated for kindergarten.

In my discussion of the “love model”, I suggested that these respectful contracts require each to respectfully embrace the interests of the other parties, incorporating those interests into their own, because we each must check, where we can, that the decisions of others are reasonable from their own point of view, with their reason uncoerced and free of indoctrination. This is going to be very difficult for teachers to do, where the interests of their employers cannot be equal to the interests of their learners. It will be difficult, too, for any manager who is hired to lead, where the interests of the  employee must be balanced against the manager’s contractual obligations to those who employed them. The unevenness of these demands is likely to be a force for insincerity and hypocrisy.

Formal leadership

Where the leader⁄follower relationship is formalised in institutions, and the authority conferred from above rather than arising naturally among equal agents, we are likely to be faced with moral and psychological paradoxes and contradictions, the more so to the extent that we live in societies that hold dear to principles that emphasise the equal respect for persons, or the Golden Rule, and eschew differences in basic human worth. One sphere of modern societies where it is hard to escape the need for such structures is the military.

Barbara Tuchman’s account of the French military in the fourteenth century is vivid about the need for such a structure. [2] The French warrior-leader class, enraptured by the glorification of their own role in war, prioritised their hand-to-hand combat with edged weapons over military organisation, strategy and tactics, to the extent that they were clearly prepared to lose battles and even wars rather than abandon the battle privileges of the knightly classes. Rarely could they combine effectively under a disciplined command structure, and they were contemptuous of the role of remotely fired missiles as being beneath their chivalry, for they were the true warriors. Fighting was their purpose and this meant – among the French – that they were indifferent to the effective deployment of archers and crossbowmen.

And so they suffered humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat – Poitiers, Crecey, Agincourt, Mahdia, Nicopolis. Over time, the reluctance of the aristocrats to abandon their romance with edged weapons, and their conviction that wars should be about them, gave way to mercenary and then standing armies with unified command structures. The requirements of emerging nationhood could not continue to tolerate the petty egos that got in the way of military success.

By Warterloo, we have military technology that depended on a deep bondage between man and machine. Drill and harsh discipline welded infantry units, in particular, into collective mechanistic bodies of men that had to stand firm in lines in the face of the enemy, lined up fifty yards away, accepting and returning volleys and then reloading under fire with unthinking efficiency and without breaking ranks. With this human technology, there was no room for initiative let alone “leadership” in the “other ranks”. Just the sheer possibility of the survival of the unit intact was dependent upon the maintenance of a thoroughly disciplined order, and reinforced by the whip. The Duke of Wellington could speak of the men who died at his command as “the scum of the earth”.

It is worth remembering that industrialisation was under way in Britain at the time of Waterloo, and quickened afterwards – that a mass, mechanised workforce was being developed, and that the structure of leadership resembled the military one – management, foremen and women, and workers on the line. Our modern systems of schooling were also soon to evolve from their medieval template – as the Prussian State was being militarised to facilitate early nineteenth century military practice, and even before it industrialised. This is the universal system of schooling adopted by the Western world quite some time before the universal franchise.

The military of Waterloo is, of course, a far cry from the military of today, and the changes are reflected in the requirements of leadership in military organisation.

A top-down hierarchy of leadership still seems quite unavoidable. Battles can move swiftly, and commanders at all levels are partly fighting the “fog of war”. As circumstances evolve in the field, local commanders can have little insight into the ways in which the larger picture is developing around them, and are dependent upon what others, more remotely situated, can understand both of what is emerging in the light of complex intelligence, and what is involved in coordination with other forces; in reinforcement or support. The unified action required is dependent upon a chain of command, and upon decisive orders. Though questioning commands cannot be ruled out, the possibilities and benefits of protracted debate may be few.

But although we can see the necessity of a chain of command that is in many ways heir to the structure of Waterloo armies, even in democracies, the developments of modern warfare have highlighted the needs for greater flexibility, and the greater exercise of human intelligence and initiative than could have seemed helpful with Waterloo technology. No longer are we moving large blocks of men, in order, around a limited battlefield. Modern warfare emphasises movement; rapidly with vehicles, but also on foot – “fire and move”. Under these circumstances, situations evolve equally rapidly, but still under conditions of the local “fog of war”, and this means that considerable initiative must be in the hands of those directly engaged in front-line fighting.

No matter how good the communications, those in the rear are now often poorly placed to appreciate what is happening locally, and it now becomes necessary to allow – and encourage – more initiative in the hands of those engaged in the actual combat. Given the speed of movement, the firepower, and the novelty of situations, anyone might have to become a “leader”, quite regardless of rank. Thus, alongside the top-down, hierarchical command structure that is still a necessity – because of the larger problems of coordination and the “big picture” – we now have a concept of “distributed leadership”, as well. All troops need to operate under the expectation that circumstances might arise in which any of them might have to take an initiative.

Though there is, too, the sense that such leadership must be “cultivated” and “taught”, it is interesting to notice how different it is, in its conception, from conventional leadership in which the authority to lead is conferred from above. Indeed, insofar as any of us might need to become the leader “out there”, we are speaking again of a kind of leadership that might be natural among a group of respectful equals, rather than anything that is formally imposed.

In part, too, this lies in the recognition of the strength of the bond that is to be built among these warriors. Their comrades are their “brothers”; “bands of brothers”, and these bonds, tested by combat, in which they are firstly fighting for each other, can become stronger than any other bonds they are likely to form in their lifetimes.

But why does this “distributed leadership” have to be taught, if it so resembles the responsibility that should naturally arise, and be cultivated, among respectful equals? The first answer, of course, is that we continue to extend an “education system” that encourages dependency and discourages the sorts of practical relationships of moral equality in which this “natural” sort of stepping up can arise and thrive on its own. This is, in part, simply a matter of “educational time” – the more time learners spend in conventional classrooms, the less time they have to learn to do their part in naturally occurring relationships. Inevitably, those who enter basic training will come with such an “educational” inheritance – a social deficit.

But the other reason in which this “leadership preparation” (for distributed leadership) requires deliberate attention, conceptualisation, and a formal focus, is that it has to be enabled against its contradiction – the formal, conferred and appointed authority of the official chain of command. In a system where the dominant and formal mode of authority and leadership is non-consensual, it will be necessary to recreate the consensual deliberately, fostering the initiative that it will require, and carefully delineating its boundaries. We might not even notice, let alone remark upon “distributed leadership” if it wasn’t for the necessity of the formal chain of command.

This isn’t, of course, an isolated process. It has its parallel, in schooling, where we once had “catering for individual differences”, and now have “personalised learning”. The need for such considerations would never have arisen if we had not built an entire factory system for schooling the masses. An education system that was built, in the first place, to cater for individual differences would not have to try and mitigate the evils of institutionalisation built to give the same treatment to diverse raw materials.

A similar situation arises in our factory systems of nursing homes, or “resthomes” for the care of the elderly. Working within these systems, we are likely to encounter the project of “personalised care” – a movement with its own workshops and training, its consultants and “leaders”. “Personalised care” would not need to be created, except that the system itself is formally impersonal, and residents processed as if the raw materials in a factory. We built it that way.

But it is now clear also that, even where a formal and hierarchical chain of command is still a military necessity, the interests of military effectiveness have encouraged changes in how this leadership authority is exercised. It is now recognised that good leaders will solicit the thoughts of those under their command when proposing and outlining missions. Clearly, if you want distributed leadership, you need to encourage those who might need to exercise it to think about the purposes and execution of the mission.

It would be foolish to leave that to the moment that the emergency arose. If their commanders can’t appreciate their thinking, and perhaps learn from  it, then don’t expect too much from them in the field. They will need confidence in their judgment then, and that confidence will come from how their peers and commanders see them – lacking that respect, their peers and commanders will deny them that confidence.

Of course there is an insight here too about the value of collective intelligence that goes together with the appreciation of the power of “distributed leadership”, and that is the limitations of depending on the single intelligence of one bright, shiny pin at the top of a pyramid. It is fairly common wisdom in the military, as elsewhere, that officers wedded to the brilliance of their own ideas are idiots.

The best ones listen to those beneath them, because they have enough rightful humility to appreciate the possible limitations of their own thinking. Hence officers are encouraged to cultivate the thought of their subordinates, looking for better ideas and suggestions than they can expect to come up with on their own, and being willing to adapt their plans accordingly. Their responsibility as leaders isn’t to come up with the best ideas. It is to choose them and take responsibility for them.

Thus, even within the one setting in which a hierarchical command structure is likely to be most indicated, its wise implementation is to employ leadership and its responsibilities only at those points where it is absolutely necessary. Formally conferred authority should only need to appeal to that authority in precisely definable circumstances where those in authority are specifically charged with that authority – with taking and executing decisions, or maintaining discipline. These occasions preclude the democratic, but they can also leave considerable scope for the democratic, bounded simply by those lines of authority and responsibility.

Hence a clear understanding of the lines of what falls under that authority can allow for a democracy of discussion among equals in search of the best ideas and considerations – the sort of discussion that will need to underpin the possibility of that “distributed leadership” occurring and being effective. The best formal, externally authorized leadership is a leadership that pares leadership down, not one that elevates it into a cult.

Civilian life is, for the most part, far less subject to the conditions that justify the command structures of the military; the speed of movement, and the rapid evolution of novelty under the fog of war. Perhaps highly trained, reflexive coordination under extreme stress, ruled by chains of command may well still be justified in the civilian world in the limited roles of “first responders” and their like,  operating under quite narrowly defined circumstances – a certain amount of haste, heightened emotion, and “fog”.

Elsewhere, there is everywhere a huge potential for paring leadership down, and for developing the spheres of communal intelligence and collaborative action among moral equals.  This should be the overwhelming feature of institutionalised civilian activity, fully capitalising on the power of human motivation, adaptability and innovation for shared collective purposes. It should be the dominant and most obvious feature of social organisation because it is the most ethical form of organisation, truly respecting persons equally.

But for those who are preoccupied with institutional or organisational success, it should be the overwhelming face of organisation anyway, because it is the most effective, maximising genuine collaboration and offering the best chance of the best ideas and understandings becoming available for decision.

Pared-down leadership, trimmed as closely as possible and limited to specific, formal responsibility to remote stakeholders, would represent no more than special nodes of decision in an institutional web, the anxieties of decision being cushioned by the quality of information and advice that the manager initially, and then the team in its own right, would be able to cultivate. And here, in a mature organisation, the manager would only constrain their leadership of teams just to the extent that he or she would be responsible to others for the final decision that had to be made on behalf of superiors.

Otherwise, their management success would lie in becoming less a leader of a team than a member of it, transferring responsibility to the group itself for its effective self-organisation and maintenance according to agreed protocols. In immature organisations the process of management would be a process of cultivating groups and teams so that they can become self-regulating; with managers gradually divesting themselves of leadership until it could reach its necessary minimum.

Sadly, In civilian organisations located in societies that are supposed to value democratic arrangements based on the equality of respect, organisational practice is frequently much more archaic than the ideals and proposals of the Marine Corps Manual. Equally sadly, instead of being pared down, the awareness of leadership is heightened by the peculiar sense that it needs to be professionalised, theorised and made much of through the development of an inappropriate cult of leadership.

At the very points at which leadership needs to be toned down to more closely represent respectful contracts, qualified just by the ways in which the formal needs and interests of external authority must be satisfied, leadership is celebrated into a cult, a matter of specialised expertise and theory, researched and idealised in university centres and specialised departments. The effect is to heighten the contradiction of authority, not to enable the best reconciliation with it, and to heighten the performance anxiety of leadership as well.

The difficulties of overcoming this lie, as we should expect, in education. We are all brought up to be followers, just in terms of sheer classroom time, in which our dependency is cultivated, our own interests and curiosities are denied, and we are obliged to follow agendas that are not our own. Most of us are going to have to be employees. But then we are all encouraged to aspire to be leaders, because the system itself is set up to facilitate meritocracy.

Our teachers represent both roles to us – being our first models of leaders in that larger society – while also being followers, since they don’t represent our interests, but are clearly bound to the interests of other, remote and more elevated leaders. We are not, in other words, brought up with the powers, knowledge and abilities – or the confidence in ourselves – of democratic citizens, let alone equipped to make something of our own lives, though we may (in that perplexingly contradictory way of schooling) be taught a good deal “about” the former, at least.

“Success” will be access to the jobs with higher pay and status, and this will immediately project us into the prospect and importance of “leadership” situations. Almost any further advance in our careers will raise questions about our leadership qualities, and the minefield of leadership theory and the professionalisation of leadership.

The ego problem of leadership is now inescapable. Our “worth”, our “merit” under the meritocracy will depend upon our understanding ourselves to be better than others in our age cohort. All that testing at school prepared us for this, and now it is being offered to us in concrete terms, on the plate of “success”. Acceptance of this will likely be a condition of advancement.

This is not the way in which humility is cultivated, and nor is it the way to cultivate our respect for the capabilities of our fellows. It is at odds with any beliefs we might otherwise have been able to develop about “stepping up”, or “taking initiative” as equals in natural settings. To believe such things in our hearts, let alone to cultivate such things, runs counter with everything we have “come to know”, and with the expectations that surround us. We learn, too, that part of the cult of leadership is to fake humility.

The psychological problems with leadership, which make it so difficult to supersede, are the problems of ego and fear. Our meritocratic schooling created these problems, and the cult of leadership cranks them up to a new pitch. As with institutional teaching, when we are hired to lead, we are hired to “do the leading to them”, and they are the people, as followers, who are to respond to our will. Success in leading has to do with executing the plans of those who hired us, and so our satisfaction arises, not from what we achieved together with those placed under us, but in our success at doing things to them that accord with the wishes of our employers or “stakeholders”.

The bottom line is that our satisfaction must align with our compliance with the agendas of those above us – and this does not diminish as we identify ourselves as leaders. We can make it prettier, and seem more humane, by talking of leading by example, and leading from behind, and cultivating, but the more this is framed by the idea of leadership, the less genuine and more token these things will be.

Unless we are prepared to break our contract with our employer, there can be no doubt about whose side we are on. The only thing that we can do to increase our commitment to those in our charge – reducing the imbalance in favour of them so that their energy and intelligence can be more properly engaged – is to diminish the leadership role to its bare essentials and focus on the creation of effective groups with as much self-directive autonomy as possible (and with us being as much a part of “them” as possible). In our effort to do this, our aim is to divest ourselves of leadership as soon and as effectively as we can – to get ourselves out of their way.

But power is seductive, as we are apt to acknowledge in every sphere but our own. “I didn’t work this hard, embrace all that student debt, come this far to hand all this over to them!” Leadership, and the status of leader, was held up as a prize, and with the prize in my grasp, I am not about to relinquish it now. We may not want to admit that we looked forward to, and now enjoy, our power over others, but its motivating power is age-old, and perhaps not unconnected with the modelling and celebrating of it that is age old, too. It is the leaders who make the history books, not the anonymous followers. “Let them go and raise the money, negotiate with the banks and the lawyers, run all the risk; create all this. Then they can have their say!”

We doubt that they can offer much to the decision-making, and we keep much of the vital information from them, so that if we play with “consulting them”, they are only able to come up with impractical suggestions that, with our intelligence and expertise (and practice, and information) we can readily dismiss. We make their incapacity self-fulfilling. We acknowledge our own merit and discount theirs, because we have risen to this position. If they were any good, they wouldn’t be our employees. We have a low opinion of most people, in general. We expect little of them, and we know why. We all went to school.

And then there is the fear.

Wherever we have a chance to look into the long cultural histories of leadership we are likely to find signs, if not outright displays, of the fear that those who would be leaders have of those they would lead. Iron fists lie behind velvet gloves lest “they” get out of hand, stage a coup, or revolt. This fear is usually rationalised in terms of more noble aims. We will all suffer if our institutions fall into disorder. Since they are not really capable of the leadership that we are especially qualified to exercise, we are doing it for their good. But they must know their place, and maintain it. And we must maintain “our authority” which, since it is based on a chain of command, cannot come from them.

This is, of course, as true of schools as it is anywhere else. We will not even look seriously at the criticisms of schooling for very many reasons, but one of the most likely is that most of them challenge the authority on which schooling is based. Almost any alternative conception to schooling would entail a shift of attention from the agendas that we have for learners, to the respect that we should have for their duties to their own lives, and this would run counter to almost every brick in the edifice of schooling.

Schooling professionals, researchers and theorists cannot entertain how this could lead to anything but anarchy, and the wilfulness of ignorant children. Any serious attempt to switch from a model in which we “do it to them” towards a model centring on them “doing it to themselves” (except very, very cautiously, and under our close supervision) is an invitation to them to run riot. If we did so, we would have to contend with them throwing it in our faces, if not actually striking. Many teachers would point out that their pupils hardly give them any respect as it is. They need to learn to respect their elders and betters, and not be encouraged to question the authority of teachers. It would be irresponsible of us to expose them to the criticisms of schooling. They are far too immature.

This is the best explanation of why education and schooling is never studied in all those years of schooling, let alone critically.

We simply dare not study education seriously in schooling and expect to continue to do what we do. The direction that such a heightened awareness would inevitably force us to fills us with fear.

The history of the politics of leadership is replicated in the political structure of schooling. They are incapable, and we are capable – hence they must follow us, and we must compel them in their own interests. There is an element of truth in both circumstances – the political structure of leadership throughout our institutions, and the political structure of schooling.

Out there, the large mass of the people in our institutions who are to be followers have been, and continue to be, infantilised. By the way in which we have brought them up, and by the structures that we maintain to sustain their inability, they have been rendered unable to form self-managing groups that can optimise their own group intelligence. In such circumstances, just dismantling our structures of command and authority, and handing things over to them, it is reasonable to expect that the result will be chaos and confusion. We have deliberately incapacitated them with our systems of upbringing. It is nurture, and not nature, and it takes very little observation of our structures of “education” to see how it works.

Both teachers (the more so the older the students), and “leaders” throughout our society, fear anything that might seem to result in a “loss of their authority”. To lose authority is to lose respect – not the ethical “respect” that is at the centre of our discussion of education throughout, but the respect that we should all have for the lion, when we dangle an arm through the bars, or the respect that we should have for the mafia boss.

We fear paring down our leadership to those core responsibilities that we have toward our superiors, because we fear that in doing so, we will lose that sort of respect; the respectful submission to our views and to the agendas we have for those who are beneath us. They will stop listening to us, and go their own way. We don’t trust the possibility of an ethical contract; the recognition that respect for the agency of those “subordinate to us” depends upon respect for that core, authoritative role of decision that we still must retain and exercise.

We don’t believe that, receiving the benefits of the arrangement, the others will do their part. And from their part – given a lifetime of experience – they would be right to be suspicious of our motives anyway. But even children can learn to do these things where the rest of us have been incapacitated.

Now if we combine the fear of loss of authority and respect with the ego of leadership – of the status, exaggerated self-worth, and the privileges of power – we can see why it is so difficult to divest ourselves of all unnecessary trappings of leadership in favour of realising a much more humble but effective management role. It not only goes against everything that we have been taught that leaders and followers are, and what all those leadership gurus, departments, and programmes stand for; it goes against everything we have been taught to feel and desire for ourselves. We are trapped in our own medievalism.

Democratic character

Of course the leadership community will be vocal in denying that I am describing leadership at all; not the leadership that they stand for. The leadership that they will want to espouse will be full of leading by example, leading from behind, compassionate mentoring, “servant” leaderships, and cultivating leadership in all people. But my point throughout this discussion is that the more that we place emphasis on these things, the more inappropriate it becomes to try to keep them under the category of “leadership” at all.  So long as these enthusiasts continue to do so, their efforts will always be dogged by the fundamental conceptual opposition between leader and follower, the moral inequality it represents, and the arrogant egoism and fear that it engenders. It will also founder on the source of the authority of the leadership, where it is not conferred by the group itself, but external to those who are required to “follow”.

These things which appear to humanise leadership and make it respectful simply collapse into the sorts of qualities of good character and behaviour that everyone might seek to possess, simply in the course of trying to become good human beings who can play their part. They are also the qualities that we would want in each other in relationships of respectful equality. This is particularly true in the context of any genuine democracy. Instead of truly grasping the importance and centrality of equal respect, the attempt to appropriate natural and respectful processes of moral equality to the ethically ambiguous notion of  leadership simply reinforces leadership as an anti-democratic cult.

In this way, the cult of leadership undermines the larger and more important educational enterprise of enabling strong, self-respecting individuals who, out of an equality of respect, are committed to creating and maintaining educational conditions that facilitate the flourishing of the personal agency of all. We should all be concerned to make this happen for each other. We should not be setting out to create leaders of each other. On the contrary, we should be creating the ability to stand eye-to-eye and work out our relationships together, equipped to devise and enter into respectful agreements and enterprises in which we are each prepared to play our part, strong in ourselves.

Everywhere, then, we should all be favouring relationships, groups and communities that can reason together, encouraging group support for the protocols and conventions that emphasise respectful cooperation in the pursuit of better understanding for all participants, in which the consideration of ideas, arguments and proposals are appreciated and judged by each of us on their merits, regardless of who originates them. We should all be supporting those protocols and conventions in which those ideas can be explored thoughtfully and at depth beyond the tiredness, and the cliched quality that they may have come to have in everyday life, and beyond the emotional triggers that may have turned them into weapons of rhetoric, or easy excuses, or evasions. We should be supporting social arrangements that circumvent and undermine all such obstacles to the possibilities of our own understanding.

Far too often it is the ideas that we take to be silly, or we think to be just the way things inevitably are, or that we assume to be impractical, or even when it seems so obvious to us that they are just or unjust; such apparently silly ideas can so often turn out to be the arguments that reveal our own shallowness, superficiality, or inability to take mastery of a situation. So we need groups with sensitivity, that are not judgmental – particularly of the person who makes the proposal – but are open and willing to help develop a poorly formulated idea into a good one, including when it appears to go against what we believe.

We need to favour groups in which we can have our beliefs and convictions seriously challenged without driving us to retreat deeply into the cement of our certainty and anxiety – challenge that can be offered and accepted not merely because we accept the challenge, but also because we are willing to seek out good challenges, appreciating as we should that this is necessary if we are to improve our thinking, our understanding, our ideas. We all should know that we can be wrong, and that resistance that we have to challenge is the sure way for us to stay wrong.

Thus we need groups that accept us and value us for our difference, support us in our difference, allowing our difference to grow, while also being challenging of our difference, and what is to be made of it. For these reasons we need to favour groups in which we can be vulnerable, and in which we extend mutual support for vulnerability to each other. We need groups that are strong, that build confidence, that build trust, that build courage, but all in the interests of the disciplined, critical, mutual development of knowledge and understanding.

But favouring such relationships and groups in which – or out of which – “arrangements can be reasonable from the points of view of all who are parties to the arrangements” involves more than just “favouring”, as if we should wait around until they happen to show up. If we are committed to respect, we should be committed to such arrangements, and their development and maintenance. We should want the benefits of such arrangements, and because of this we should be “prepared to do our part”.

Because such arrangements are vital to the possibility of each of us working out our lives for ourselves, we should stand for such relationships and arrangements. This means that we should step up for the establishment of rules, and protocols, and conventions that enable the honesty and trust, the respectful challenge and vulnerability, the willingness for each of us to give reasons, and exchange reasons, and to change our minds, and for the mutual support and good will that all of these things require.

These are personal and social virtues that we should stand for, not just in terms of some abstract notion of what it is to be a good person, but because these are core requirements for us to fulfill our duty to ourselves to live well. It is the only way in which we can have real access to the knowledge that we need in order to “make up our own minds”, and it is key to our ability to support each other in this pursuit that each of us must engage in for our own sakes, because it turns out that we need each other to do it.

So we all need to stand up for these things, and this means that we all have a role in making such relationship and groups happen. We all have a role in creating the sociology, so that the ways in which we all know that groups control people, and socialise them, and demand conformity of them can be harnessed to regulate and control behaviour that might otherwise undermine respect and the possibilities of reasoning. We need to support a sociology that disciplines in the interests of respect, favouring a sociability that creates mutual trust and trustworthiness, allowing the opportunities for all of us to speak freely, to be courageous in disagreement, to criticise freely but compassionately, while being mutually receptive, sensitive and supportive in enabling these things, and the explorations and improvements that they can make possible; for us as well as others.

We need to support sociologies that allow us to seek knowledge and understanding together, enabling us to remain united in support of these group virtues and practices of respect and respectful dialogue, socialising into them each new generation or willing participant. This would not be a sociology of a slavish conformity, but a sociology of self-disciplining freedom, recognising the discipline that freedom requires, and creating and sustaining collective conventions and collective practices that enable each of us to realise our agency in the development of our own lives of worth.

We need to be willing and able to stand up for these virtues within the group, just as we need to be willing and able to stand up for the group itself. Such groups should be “leaderless” wherever possible – not made up of leaders and followers – and not that absurdity in which all are leaders –  but of people who can come together in equal mutual respect, cooperatively, all of whom should be willing to stand up for these things in respectful ways, stepping up for them when they see the need; playing their part.

Such groups are not merely the foundation of any genuinely educational arrangement, they should be the foundation of any institutional structure that we set out to create in our society beyond formal education as well; not merely any organisation that wants to offer the reality instead of the  pretence of respect, but any organisation that wants to be effective in creating goods or services, policy or administration, justice, wealth-creation and management or environmental recovery and protection, simply because this is what organisation requires in order to optimise its own intelligence in the service of any serious and worthy pursuit.

And this would be democracy itself, of course, meeting its educational requirement; a genuine democracy supporting our equally valuable fellows in all of our difference, protecting our own self-determining lives, and the education we all need in order to develop and live them.

Does this mean that all organisations and institutions should be “leaderless”? No; though where formal leadership is unavoidable, it should be minimised and accepted reluctantly for the undesirable limit it imposes on our moral equality. We have so lost our sense of what is appropriate under democratic conditions that we readily fall into the creation of dichotomies of leadership – that leadership should be everywhere, it is virtuous, and we should all aspire to it; or it is a bad practice, and we should attempt to eliminate it.

This loss of a sense of appropriateness and discrimination in our practice arises because of a mob-like commitment to vague, popular ideas which are seemingly exempt from the need to clarify our concepts and ruling values, or to develop the deeper principles for our practices and discuss cases extensively, so that we might be able carefully to judge where leadership should legitimately be called it into being, despite the way in which it elevates some over others. Such cultishness and fashion is, perhaps, more typical of practice in the educational domain than of any other.

There are many organisations and institutions that do not require “leadership” at all, and they may well be our most important institutions. “Leaderless” institutions often do require organisation and administration, however. They require agreed divisions of labour, and they no doubt require “chairs”, whose duties explicitly exclude being the advocates for any particular “vision”. It is often desirable in such institutions, of course, that there be advocates for various views or visions, and some of these people may have special expertise, or experience. This becomes toxic and potentially divisive once they think of themselves as “thought leaders”, however.

Even when we have leaders of state governments, we recognise that it is better when they lead by consent, rather than as representatives of special interest. Public discussion, and democracy itself quickly suffers, nevertheless, when it is dominated by would-be leaders, all contesting with each other. Discussion that reduces to the practices of debating competitions, and dialogue that reduces to mere oratory does not enable democracy, and the consent achieved by the eventual “winner” is wounded, as is their ability to bring contending groups back together.

Nevertheless, there will be organisations that various stakeholders wish to set up for a particular purpose, and these may well want to appoint “managers” and administrators, and assign them special responsibilities.

As has been argued at length, above, the proper development of the powers of collective engagement and intelligence of all those involved will require that these points of special responsibility and their scope are clearly defined and kept to an absolute minimum, in order that the inevitable distortions of power, the suppression of intelligence and the inappropriate ego that flows from formal leadership be mitigated as much as possible, allowing collective intelligence and imagination, engagement and energy to be harnessed to the full. To the extent that such moments of formal leadership are necessary, they should be transparent and honest, and their dangers and limitations acknowledged by all parties.

But surely – even when the organisation is set up around a worthy vision – there is leadership in the initial creation of powerful, responsible, collaborative communities of equals?

Yes there is. But the process that this leadership involves should be ruled by genuinely educational principles, which is all that ever could be justified. This means that it is not about “doing it to them”, but about setting up conditions under which they can take charge of themselves. It can hardly even begin without their provisional consent, and the whole process will always depend upon what they are able to “make of it” so far. Where there is no genuine consent – where compliance is mere outward display (as it so often is) – the purpose has yet to be achieved. Everything will turn on what the “leaders” can appreciate of the experience of these “followers”, and on their “making”; not ours. The first principle of such “leadership” is that it be done in the interests of enabling the agency of the led; thereby transcending itself.

This, in other words, should be a temporary condition, after which it simply becomes one of supportive, tending, maintenance – facilitating the rules, procedures and protocols that the community itself has come to stand for – being responsible for the enduring quality of the relationships in community. This would, genuinely, be a manager whose role it is to serve – a manager of the conditions under which others operate – rather than that oxymoron of “servant leadership”.

In this, the role of manager is pretty much identical with the role of the genuine educator. The purpose is to enable the mature independence of the learner – that they manage or educate themselves – which means that the purpose of the manager or educator is to replace themselves – to arrange things so that learners pass them by and become their own managers and educators. The formal manager works to make their own “leadership” redundant, so that it is no longer necessary.

The direction of their activity should therefore be away from leadership, which must otherwise maintain some distinction between those who are to lead and those who are to follow, moving instead towards a greater equality in which the authority of leadership is increasingly surrendered to a collective authority. As this evolves, there might be little apparent difference between the activities of the formal manager in supporting and maintaining the community, and any member, who might at any time step up to do much the same thing as a responsible equal, willing to do their part.  The difference may be little more than that the official manager may have more time and opportunity to be aware of the whole, and may also see such “stepping up” as a particular aspect of their role in the division of the labour of equals.

As such a manager acts in this process of creating a community capable of exercising its own authority and responsibility, it is vital, too, that they to do this in a timely fashion, with every element serving to hasten that advance, and not fill it endlessly with things “they” have to know and understand before “they” may take charge of themselves. It is self-consciously to avoid the excuse of the sort of “gradualism” that many continue to use to justify schooling, in which “educators” might suppose that they are working towards the eventual independence of learners – but it will just take twelve years.

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[1]  This discussion is indebted to Benne, Kenneth. “Authority in Education.” Harvard Educational Review 40, no. 3 (September 1, 1970): 385–410.

[2]  Tuchman, Barbara W. 1987. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Reissue edition. Random House Trade Paperbacks.

© R. Graham Oliver, 2019, 2020

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