I am sure I am not saying anything new or revolutionary claiming that crucial for emergent economies is education and health care. I will get back in another post on health care. We seem to have developed a deep-rooted belief in the world that people first have to become sick, before they become interesting for health care. On a societal level, indeed, health care as a business: first make them sick (junk food, stress, non-inclusiveness, non-respect, etc), then make them healthy again. Ever thought about preventive medicine ?
But the idea was educational leadership. The role of the principal in day to day school life is of course crucial. Not that much for running its finance, making the schedules, etc, but rather for really showing leadership; educational leadership. As Drysdale and his colleagues (study at the Melbourne University) said a few years ago: we need to start thinking from success to sustainability. They give four roles to the principal: Building vision; understanding and developing people; redesigning the organisation; managing the teaching and learning programme.
And I would like to add: building a vision starts with identifying the values we want to realise. What are we doing it for? What do we contribute to society? If we feel society would be missing on values, how can we contribute to realising them?
A short while ago I had the pleasure to address a large number of principals of a Western Cape region. The argument I developed was not only for the principal to be a visionary leader, the way we describe him or her above. In many aspects, the successful principal is a social entrepreneur.
A few thoughts of interest of Charles Maisel on what a social entrepreneur is might explain my argument. A social entrepreneur needs to see things differently, start flipping things around. Entrepreneurship is about seeing, seeing the possibilities. In fact, it is all about learning to look at things differently. A social entrepreneur is not in for maximising profit, but for solving a pressing social problem on a population-wide scale. He or she creates. And oh yes, share your idea, tell people about it.
Building principals to visionary leaders in education is probably the task we should tackle today. I would suggest this goes via the development of the social entrepreneurships skills of those principals: hence a managerial concern and not an educational one !
