Abstract
In this paper we claim educational leadership as an autonomous discipline whose goals and strategies should not mirror those typical of business and political leadership. In order to define the aims proper to educational leadership we question three common assumptions of what it is supposed to carry out. First, we turn to Hannah Arendt and her contemporary critics to maintain that education aims at opening up exceptions within the normal course of events rather than simply preserving it. This way, education is not reduced to an instrument at the service of the reinforcement of a given social and economic system. This leads us to ask what should exactly educational leadership oppose by means of these exceptions. According to Tyson E. Lewis’s wise application to education of Giorgio Agamben’s ontology of impotentiality, the apparently reasonable idea that education must help the subject to develop his potentials is precisely an instrumentalization of education which brings about a desubjectification of the learner. Education should actually make the pupil aware of his right not to carry his potentiality to its actualization and dwell instead in a state of impotentiality. Third and last, we complicate this picture by alluding to Zygmunt Bauman’s critique of the rejection of Western individuals to realize certain possibilities, which they deem too costly. By analysing in conjunction Agamben’s encouragement to suspend one’s potential and Bauman’s insistence on the need of not suspending it, we conclude by defining what, in our opinion, defines the raison d’être of educational leadership.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Beginning with Gustave Le Bon The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), the study of leadership underwent a qualitative leap in the 1940s at the Ohio State University and a few years later again at the University of Michigan.
See for example Bass’ (1990) insights into educational leadership.
Gary Yukl’s reflections on organizational effectiveness are often applied to educational leadership. See for example Yukl (2008). For him, “[a]theory of strategic leadership should explain how top executives influence the organizational processes that determine a firm’s financial performance and long-term survival (…). The explanation should take into account the influence of top executives on strategic objectives, competitive strategy, the formal structure, management of systems and programs, the corporate culture; and the members’ skills and motivation” (Yukl 2008: 709).
For an example of how the principles of business ethics are being applied to education see, for instance, Patrick Duignan’s Educational Leadership. Together Creating Ethical Inspired Learning Environments (2012). He gives advice concerning the performance of the educational leader. He emphasizes, for example, the need to keep all stakeholders informed (44, 98) and to prioritize organizational needs (96). See also Robert Palestini’s (2012) study of ten educational leaders he deems successful, from which he underlines their ability to “develop a strategic plan”, to “develop regulations”, to “display symbols of achievement in the workplace” and to “show concern for one’s personal appearance” (Palestini 2012: 142–143).
See for instance James P. Spillane, who focuses on how “[e]ducational leadership can be orchestrated from and across different levels of the school system (e.g., district office) and from, through, and with agencies beyond the formal government system” (Spillane 2004: 171) and who examines different types of leadership distribution (collaborated distribution, collective distribution, etc.) regardless of their goals. The focus is on management and organizational issues rather than on the content of education itself.
Henry A. Giroux (1992) has already pointed out that the long-term national strategy The Goals 2000: Educate America Act (P. L. 103–227), signed into law in 1994 by Bill Clinton, turned educational leadership into mere management. To pick only one of the aspects of education he focuses on: “Testing runs the risk of becoming a code word for training educational learners in the language of management, measurement, and efficiency” (1992: 6). Along the same vein, Leithwood et al. (1999) pointed out that principals are often not aware of whether they are leading or managing. It is also worth mentioning the view of Tony Bush, who worked on educational leadership before it became a trending topic. He warns us against the “danger of ‘managerialism’, a stress on procedures at the expense of educational purpose and values” (Bush 2007: 391). Yet an attentive reading of his “Educational leadership and management: theory, policy, and practice” (2007) reveals that, following former researchers, he considers that leadership has to do with change, while management is a maintenance activity (Bush 2007: 392), and therefore leadership, for him, is also about managing. In our view, though, this is not precise—management has to do with organization, whereas leadership has to do with the capacity of influencing on the content and the direction.
As Hohepa claims, in such a context educational leadership runs the risk of losing its vocation to “address underachivement among students from marginalized and poorly served groups” (2012: 617).
This is obviously a common claim among philosophers of education. See, for instance, Merieu (1996), who claims that given that the world exists before the child is born, the role of education should be teaching him how the world works so that he can become an active member of his community. No human being, he recalls, becomes an adult without the intervention of other humans. However, Meirieu separates himself from education understood as a “manufacture” and proposes instead an education that aims at “making” the other, but an other that will ultimately escape the educator’s power. Arendt also suggests that education should achieve this balance.
This is an obvious fact, which beyond Arendt philosophy has developped at length. See, for instance, Kant’s already classic “What is Enlightenment?” (Kant 1996) and Derrida’s reflection on the question “what is education?”: “the death of the parents, the formation of the child’s consciousness, the Aufhebung of its consciousness in(to) the form of ideality” (Derrida 1986: 132).
It is also the case of John R. Wiens in Hannah Arendt and Education: Educational Leadership and Civic Humanism (2000), who claims that Arendt’s ideas on political leadership can be applied to educational leadership.
Note the analogy between Arendt’s approach to history and Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history (Benjamin 1968 [1955]), which actually Arendt translated into English. For Benjamin, the advent of the messiah must make the continuum of history jump. Magrini synthetizes Arendt’s conception of history in this way: “Arendt does not view history in terms of a linear phenomenon, which connects one generation seamlessly to the next, rather she views it as a radical series of breaks, fissures, interruptions, and innovations that occurs in a non-determinist fashion as individuals (who are ontological sites of natality)” (Magrini 2013: 74).
The conditions of possibility of the Derridean notion of justice resemble that of Arendt’s notion of action. Just as for Arendt there is only action if/when the course of events is interrupted, for Derrida there would only be justice if/when rules are suspended. For Derrida, however, although we have to tend to justice, justice will always remain other, while Arendt believes that actions can take place. For a discussion on the need to surpass the current order of things, see Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” (Derrida 1990a: 961).
Again, Meirieu’s notion of education seems aligned with Arendt’s: the educator has to refuse to be the cause of the other but still be his father. For him, the filial relationship must not become a relationship of causality or possession.
Hohepa (2012) discusses whether when indigeneous Maori access education it is always and inescapably a matter of colonizing them. She asks: “Is it possible to use and to develop knowledge in empowering ways in fields that themselves have played fundamental roles in disempowerment?” (624). Although there are obviously different degrees of colonization, and we agree with her distinction between aculturation and assimilation (623–634), we hold that education always operates, to some extent, a colonization of the subject that is being educated.
Remember Political Theology I, in which Schmitt claims that the central concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological notions. For him, the so-called state of exception, by way of which the sovereign can suspend the laws in the event of extraordinary circumstances, is but a secularized version of a miracle. Note that while for Schmitt said state of exception is a means which has to help the regular order of things be restored easily, Arendt claims, in a more Benjaminian fashion, that the miracle has to bring about something new.
Which Lewis, turning to the definition of Clayton Pierce (2013), defines as:
a particular form of capitalism that does not depreciate or use-up one’s labor power so much as continually invests in the production and reproduction of such power through a total integration of one’s potentiality into an economic/learning structure that emphasizes continual reskilling in order to survive within competitive global markets. Within this logic, social and economic problems become learning problems, and, vice versa, learning problems become problems in the management or governmentality of social and economic systems to maximize productivity (Lewis 2013: v).
Note that within this approach the collision between the Principle of Beneficence (do to somebody else what is good for him) and the Principle of Autonomy (let him do whatever he desires) is dissolved through the following implicit reasoning: the best for a student is not to learn a set of concepts, but to learn how to become autonomous and make his own choices.
For Trilla et al. (2013), the main goal of educational leadership (234) must be precisely to empower -to use the notion coined in the sixties and systematically used by Paulo Freire- the subjects so that they can efficiently communicate his interests and wishes and be able to negotiate and reach a consensus.
Lewis refers to documents as different as the twenty-first century Skills guidelines, George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act” (2001), in which he wrote that “Every child should be educated to his or her full potential” (2001, 3) and Barack’s Obama when, in describing the National educational reform strategy, 2009, said that centers should help students “fulfill their God-given potential” (July 24th 2009).
See also Darling-Hammond and Bransford (2005), who argue that the goal of neoliberal education is to ensure the economic growth of the capitalistic democratic society.
As Giroux (1992) argues, technical competence does not amount to empowerment; it can even contribute to disempowerment. In his own words: “Teaching must be linked with empowerment and not merely with technical competence” (9).
This performative character is not at odds with Steven Burik’s point (Burik 2009: 297, 309), who turns to Jacques Derrida’s Right to Philosophy, which claims that within the Western university model the department of philosophy has a priority status, albeit one that cannot be comprehended by the very logic that it founds (Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy, 109.) Even the institution upon which the different departments rest is of a performative nature –it is not the fruit of a certain logic, be it political or economical or even educational, but it legitimates itself. Education, by definition, also resists being inserted into a causal logic of any nature.
This is exactly what Giroux claims when stating that “reformers need to expand the purpose and promise of schooling beyond the narrow interests of the marketplace” (1992: 4) “by developing a public philosophy whose purpose is to animate a democratic society” (5) in order to abort “the new right attempts to disarticulate democracy and citizenship from the principles of social justice, freedom, and equality” (6).
Its goal is to guide students towards the knowledge of God, which will lead them to righteousness which, in turn, excludes biocapitalistic practices such as consumerism and emphasizes instead the need to become useful members of the society. Knowledge must serve the community, not oneself. From an Islamic perspective, “[l]earning and knowledge are not a matter of individual choice or priority, determined by personal needs or market forces. It is a duty imposed by God and defined as the path to ‘righteousness’” (368).
As Peter Trifonas (2000) points out, this is also the case of Derrida, who “characterises the conventional or classical act of teaching and learning to be the pragmatic reproduction of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ as cultivated from the premises of the interchangeable chain-linking” (Trifonas 2000: 273). The analogy of the thought of Lévinas, Rosenzweig, and Derrida might be partly explained by their adherence to several categories proper to the Jewish tradition, which, unlike the Christian tradition, is not informed by a rational logic of Greek origin. See Handelman (1982).
At the same time, Lewis’ thought does not seem incompatible with said point, typical of poststructuralist thought.
Note that Agamben’s distinction can be said to somewhat echo Heidegger’s distinction between calculative and reflexive thought (Heidegger 1959a). The former, foreseeable, calculative, and planned, is characteristic of the Western rationality. Heidegger proposes escaping from it and replacing it by a reflexive thought, which is rather a reflection on the meaning of reflecting (that is, a metareflection), which as such is not intended to a closed object, but induces us to a sort of release that he links to Gelassenheit (Heidegger 1959b).
Since, as he goes on to say: “Society holds powerful individuals with higher regard than those viewed as weak” (Ammeter et al. 2002: 785).
This does not mean that education should not exert leadership. If the person or the organisation that is responsible for this leadership does not assume it, somebody else will (Álvarez et al. 2012: 253–254).
The reader may remember that for Agamben the phenomenon of study and that of play share a fundamental aspect—the lack of intentionality. Agamben writes: “One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good” (Agamben 2003: 64). It is a matter of freeing play from a logics of causality which makes every step anticipable just as it is a matter of freeing education from predictability.
It must be underlined that Agamben does not suggest that some possibilities and potentialities must be forgotten or got rid of. He rather insists on the importance of dwelling on a state in which one does not enjoy the fruits of one’s potentiality while at the same time one does not get rid of said potentiality.
References
Agamben, G. 1999. Potentialities: Collected essays in philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. 2000. The time that remains: A comment on the letter to the Romans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (2005 [2003]). State of exception. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Álvarez, M., Antúnez, S., Gago, F. M., Gairín, J. (2012). El liderazgo educativo. Los equipos directives en centros de Secundaria, elementos básicos del éxito escolar, Madrid: Secretaría General Técnica del Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte.
Ammeter, A.P., et al. 2002. Toward a political theory of leadership. Leadership Quarterly 13: 751–796.
Arendt, H. 1958. The human condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. 1961. The crisis in education. In Between past and future, ed. H. Arendt, 170–193. New York: Penguing Books.
Aristotle, 1986. De Anima. London: Penguin.
Bass, B.M. 1990. Handbook of leadership: a survey of theory and research. NY: Free Press.
Bauman, Z. 2011. Liquid modern challenges to education. Padova: Padova University Press.
Benjamin, W. (1968 [1955]). Theses on the Philosophy of history. In Illuminations, ed. W. Benjamin, 253–264. New York: Schocken.
Burik, S. 2009. Opening philosophy to the world: Derrida and education in philosophy. Educational Theory 59(3): 297–312.
Bush, T. 2007. Educational leadership and management: Theory, policy, and practice. South African Journal of Education 27(3): 391–406.
Darling-Hammond, L., and J. Bransford (eds.). 2005. Preparing teachers for a changing world: What teachers should learn. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Deleuze, G. 1997. Incorporations. New York, NY: Zone Books.
Derrida, J. 1986. Glas. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Derrida, J. 1990a. Force of law: The ‘mystical foundation of authority’. Cardozo Law Review 11: 921–973.
Derrida, J. 1990b. Eyes of the university: Right to philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Dimmock, C., and A. Walker. 2002. School leadership in context—Societal and organizational cultures. In The principles and practice of educational management, ed. T. Bush, and L. Bell, 107–123. London: Paul Chapman.
Duignan, P. 2012. Educational Leadership. Together creating ethical inspired learning environments. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Giroux, H.A. 1992. Educational leadership and the crisis of democratic government. Educational Researcher 21(4): 4–11.
González Geraldo, José Luis; Prats, Enric. 2013. “Artesanía pedagógica y el arte del liderazgo educativo”. Liderazgo y Educación, op. Cit., 77–82.
Handelman, S.A. 1982. The slayers of Moses. The emergence of rabbinic interpretation in modern literary theory. New York, AL: State University of New York Press.
Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1966 [1959a]). Discourse on thinking. New York, AL: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (2008 [1959b]). Gelassenheit. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
Hofstede, G. 2001. Culture’s consequences. Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage.
Hohepa, M.K. 2012. Educational Leadership and Indigeneity: Doing Things the Same, Differently. American Journal of Education. Leadership in Indigenous Education 119(4): 617–631.
Kant, I. 1996. What is enlightenment?. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Le Bon, G. (2002 [1895]). The crowd: A study of the popular mind, Mineola. New York, AL: Dover.
Leithwood, K., D. Jantzi, and R. Steinbach. 1999. Chaning leadership for changing times. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Lewis, T.E. 2013. On study: Giorgio Agamben and educational potentiality. New York, AL: Routledge.
Long, C. 1998. A Fissure in the distinction: Hannah Arendt, the family and the public/private dichotomy. Philosophy Social Criticism 24(5): 85–104.
Magrini, J.M. 2013. An ontological notion of learning inspired by the philosophy of Hannah Arendt: The miracle of natality. Review of Contemporary Philosophy 12: 60–92.
Masschelein, J., and Maarten Simons. 2008. The governmentalization of learning and the assemblage of a learning apparatus. Educational Theory 58(4): 391–415.
Merieu, P. (2007 [1996]). Frankenstein pédagogue. Paris: ESF éditeur.
Mèlich, J. 2014. Disimilaciones (Intento de pensar la educación desde Emmanuel Levinas). Anuario Colombiano de Fenomenología 8: 123–141.
Pagès, A. 2013. Tecnologia i lideratge educatiu: una perspectiva filosòfica. Revista de Psicologia, Ciències de l’Educació i l’Esport 31: 15–22.
Palestini, R. 2012. Leadership lessons learned. In Approach to educational leadership, ed. A. Commonsense, 141–150. New York: Rowman & Leadership Publishers.
Shah, S. 2006. Educational leadership: An Islamic perspective. British Educational Research Journal 32(3): 363–385.
Scheffler, I. 1985. Of human potential: An essay in the philosophy of education. Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Schmitt, C. (1922/1985). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Spillane, J. 2004. Educational leadership. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 26(2): 169–172.
Trifonas, P. 2000. Jacques Derrida as a philosopher of education. Educational Philosophy And Theory 32(3): 271–281.
Trilla, J., D. Limón, and P. Soler. 2013. El liderazgo educativo en el ámbito socio-comunitario. In Liderazgo y Educación, ed. J. Arcos, and P. Ezquerra, 229–248. Santander: Ediciones Universidad de Cantabria.
Wiens, J.R. (2000). Hannah Arendt and Education: Educational Leadership and Civic Humanism. Doctoral Dissertation. Ann Arbor: MI, 2000.
Yukl, G. 2008. How leaders influence organizational effectiveness. The Leadership Quarterly 19: 708–722.
Conflict of interest
The author declares that she has no conflict of interest.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Tosas, M.R. Educational Leadership Reconsidered: Arendt, Agamben, and Bauman. Stud Philos Educ 35, 353–369 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-015-9474-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-015-9474-3