The topic of whether or not we should be teaching students leadership has been debated for years. There were many discussions about how to do it overall; everyone agrees that it is necessary to teach it to them. Ideas like classroom learning don’t work particularly well alone. Even though students may learn technical ideas and theories, they won’t actually learn how to apply what they've learned in practice. With leadership you really have to be there doing it and fail. Then use those failures to improve yourself and your methods. The qualities of a good leader are as follows: Empathy, concern for others, and even self-development. Believe it or not, leadership revolves largely around you. If you're not willing to improve yourself, you're not going to make a good and effective leader. I say that because if you can’t even see areas you need to improve, how can you help others improve? Later on you will see how crucial it is to teach leadership to students. In addition you will also see the most effective way to teach it to them; and why that is the most effective.

Though you also can not be afraid to fail, failure is the only way you are going to succeed. The only cost of failure is getting one step closer to succeeding. A quote from Thomas A. Edison says: “Of the 200 light bulbs that didn't work, every failure told me something that I was able to incorporate into the next attempt.” He also says “I didn't fail 1000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps.” (Edison) See without failure we can not improve we can not find the right way to do things. Not everyone will lead the same, everyone will have their own way of leading hands on, working from a distance. It all really depends on the student and the project at hand they are reading. Remember these things as you continue reading.The definition I am using for a leader is: 

The ability to leverage the strengths of others to achieve common goals and use interpersonal skills to coach and develop others. The individual is able to assess and manage his/her emotions and those of others; use empathetic skills to guide and motivate; and organize, prioritize, and delegate work. (F. Scott Andreu, Kenneth M. Sweet, Douglas H. Carter - 134)

So what do we need to do? We need to teach students how to be leaders. The job industry is looking for people with great leadership skills. Many things have been tried to teach students how to be leaders, but much of it has not worked very efficiently. How should this be implemented? We need something that is in the beginning, classroom-oriented, teaching the technical things. Teaching these things that will always be ongoing in searching for improvement. Then, something that takes you outside of the classroom, an actual ongoing project for students to get involved in. Allow students to get involved in leading something at their local food shelter, Church, or even a business that supports the next generation of leaders. Without this crucial part of going outside the classroom, students will never really get the experience they need, so they can go into a position of leadership.

​ The idea that not everyone is meant to be a leader is false. Though I do agree with that in more specific ways, statements like "not everyone is meant to be a 'church leader” or not everyone is meant to be a 'CEO” Though there are more leadership positions than you might think, are you a teacher or a parent? Teachers are leading students through teaching them core academic skills. Parents are leading their children and families through teaching them how to act, how to do things, and much more. If you're a married man, it’s your job to lead your household. This will later support my claim that we should never stop learning and bettering our leadership skills.

Leadership requires real life. We need to take leadership outside of the classroom. Leadership requires self-improvement; it is nonnegotiable. You always have to be willing to adapt and admit when you're wrong. Do you want to be the best leader you can? I mean, who wouldn’t want to? In Acts 20, Luke (The transcriber of Acts) says, 

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. (Acts 20:28 ESV) . 

The first thing Luke says is: “Pay careful attention” to not others but “Yourselves”. Now that being said, let me ask you this: can you, in context, actually improve yourself while in a classroom? Yes it is possible but it’s not really the best way to do it. Trying to become better in leadership requires it to actually be put into practice, and you can’t do that in a classroom. We read in 1 Timothy the qualifications of overseers (Elders in the church). 

The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife,  sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?  - (1 Tim.. 3 ESV). 

Now I already know what you are thinking, “I am not trying to be an elder, this will not apply to me”. Well, hold on there a second; I would agree that the parts about being a man, married, and a father don’t apply to most leadership positions. Though what about everything else, do you want your manager to have self-control, or do you want him to start screaming at you every time you mess something up? Do you want them to be able to teach you how to fix your mess up, or do you want them to just tell you to fix it when you don’t know how? Without a Biblical view of leadership and putting that view into practice when you're in a leadership position, what is the difference between you and a dictator? All of this really proves my third claim that the managerial mindset doesn't work.

 Something else to consider is the difference between a manager and a leader. A manager will just look at schedule, calendars, paperwork, quotas. They will not actively engage with the performance of the people under them and them improve. Where yes a leader will still do the same things as a manager if needed. Even more so unlike a manager they will be actively involved in their workers' performance. They will be looking for ways to help them improve. As much as they can, they will do what works for them. Even if sometimes it means admitting he himself is wrong.

Being a good leader has nothing to do with your academic background. Take a look at Charlie Kirk. At the age of 18, he started Turning Point USA (TPUSA). Just graduating high school, Charlie was planning on going to college like every other student, but after he finished going after his dream of starting TPUSA. In the introduction of his book “The College Scam,” he said he was touring Baylor University. On that tour, he was talking to the president of Baylor, and he asked Charlie about his plans. So Charlie told him, “I planned to build a youth organization,” (Charlie Kirk) and the president liked his ideas. So he said, “It’ll take a lot of time and hard work to get the organization off the ground. Why don’t you take a year to focus on starting the organization once it’s up and running? You can always come back to Baylor.” Well, Charlie took his advice. Well, looking ahead now, Charlie died having started the biggest student organization ever. Being a leader to millions of people, hundreds of employees, a family, and much more. He did all this without what? 

A college education, or any academic background past high school. All of this supports my second claim. He didn’t go to school and he still turned out as an extremely successful leader in today’s time. It was all learned, and he bettered his leadership skills through putting it into practice, not sitting in a class room. This will later support my policy on how this should all be implemented. In this day there is a big gap in leadership. Students who come out of college are not readily prepared for work because they do not have basic leadership skills that are required. I will touch on this more in my policy of implementation.

One of the big arguments against having leadership classes in schools is that; Not everyone is meant to be a leader. I can see the argument being made here, but where the argument falls through is when you think about more than just the top 1% of leaders. Sure, the president of Meta is a leader, but so is the janitor who works under him. Let me ask you this question: are you a parent, a teacher, or do you run a project at work? That is just a few things, and there's much more. If you have even done or are one of those things, you're a leader. Let’s dive deeper into being a parent. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it.” (Prov. 22:6 NKJV) What this is saying is you should lead your children to success. You need to teach them how to act. So when they are an adult, they will not forget what you have taught them.When you finish your course on leadership, that doesn't mean you stop learning how to be a leader. No, I'm not referring to my earlier points on how you should always be trying to improve yourself. Although you should! For those of you who are parents, you know how challenging it can be sometimes. Especially if you're a working parent, you understand this. As a parent, you need to be able to lead your children while managing your life, time, and other responsibilities.

Now, how I believe we should go about implementing this is as I was saying earlier, have a mixed classroom format. As you were reading earlier in my proof about not needing education to be a good and effective leader. I was talking about how college doesn't prepare you to be able to be a proper leader. College only prepares you to be able to do work with book smarts. They teach you everything you need to know about your major and more. Though they are missing a key piece in their teaching. Leadership classes at a secondary undergraduate school teach the in classroom portion of how to be a leader. Though they do not take it outside of the classroom. The students never have a chance to actually put those skills into action. 

How I believe we should go about this to make students good effective leaders, who can find ways to improve their leadership skills, themselves and is this: The classroom teaching should be split into a small percentage. In the class room we should be teaching how we can look for ways to improve ourselves, how to identify poor and good leadership and also what it means in detail to be a leader. Next the student will shadow someone in place of leadership for a day where they can learn what a day looks like in a chosen field of their choice. Students will be able to choose what and where they shadow so they will actually be interested in the topic and the field they will be working in for the rest of the year. From there we allow the students to be able to find another company or stay with that company. Once doing this they would get a mentor and they   We need to get students involved in a place where they can have enough leadership responsibility that they can learn. However, we do not want to give them enough that they are able to change and implement things that hurt the mission, values, or brand of the company. As they are still learning, you are not going to throw someone in the deep end if they do not know how to swim, they will drown. The same thing applies here if you all of the sudden get this massive responsibility of leadership you will be overwhelmed and will not know what to do with all of it. This is why it’s so critical to start students out with a small amount of leadership responsibility then as they get better and prove themselves they can move into being able to do more. Some places students can get involved are local shelters, churches, or even their schools. Some things they can lead are fundraising events, portions of a church service or even leading a collection drive for that shelter whether it be a homeless shelter, food or animal. It does not matter. What really matters is that the student will be interested in the field they will take part in. We will talk about this more later on.

What are the results of people becoming effective leaders? One of the most important results especially in today's world is keeping the family together. In today's world the family has been destroyed. There are so many fatherless homes. The lack of fathers in the home creates a chain reaction with the children. The children do not have a man to look up to for mentoring. For girls they need a father to show them how a man should treat them. It also shows both boys and girls what each man and a woman's role in a marriage is. For the boys a father shows them how he should treat women and how he should act and carry himself. By teaching leadership it teaches people how to act, how to be responsible and how to grow into an adult. If we teach that at a young age there would be many more fathers with their families. This reversing the problems I mentioned before. Leadership in the family is the most crucial form of leadership. Without good and effective leadership in the home it creates a long term disrupture of the country.Another one of the many great results is that for every one leader trained they can go and train more. This creates the ripple effect. By doing this it allows the teaching to reach more people much quicker. Digital leadership is also a fantastic way for mentoring and it allows a quicker and wider spread of the teaching. An example of this is Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and this is something they are doing very effectively.

The topic of teaching students leadership has been debated for years. There were and are many discussions about how we should do it, but as a whole, everyone agrees that there is a need to teach it to them. Part of that is what sparked the idea for this topic. Ideas like classroom learning don’t work particularly well. They are learning technical things, but they won’t actually learn how to put what they're learning into practice. With leadership, you really have to be there doing it and fail over and over again until you succeed. You use those failures to improve yourself and your methods. If you're not willing to improve yourself, you're not going to make a good leader. I say that because if you can’t even see areas you need to improve, how can you help others improve? The students in school now are our future. Are we just going to sit by and watch as they take on leadership positions as business owners, CEO’s, Elders, Parents. Though they do not know what they are doing? When we move the teaching of leadership out of a classroom or book. Then into a live real world setting where students can develop and practice the skills they need to successfully lead no matter the scenario. That is how we prevent students from going in blind. This is how we create the opportunity for success for students. Now it is their decision to take advantage of it.

Sources

• Al-Teneiji, Shaikah, and Omar M. Kasawneh. “The Role of School in Fostering Leadership Skills.” International Journal of Educational Management, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 244-256.
• Andreu, F. Scott, et al. “Building Leadership Skills Through High-Impact Experiences.” Journal of Leadership Education, vol. 19, no. 4, 2020, pp. 131-139.
• Chapman, Mike. “Developing Student Leadership.” Edutopia, George Lucas Educational Foundation, 11 Apr. 2024, www.edutopia.org/article/developing-student-leadership/.
• Deresiewicz, William. “Solitude and Leadership.” The American Scholar, 1 Mar. 2010, theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/.
• Kirk, Charlie. The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth. Winning Team Publishing, 2022.
• Lennon, Elizabeth, et al. “Developing Leadership Skills in Student-Centered Classrooms.” NGLC, 8 July 2024, www.nextgenlearning.org/articles/leadership-skills-in-a-student-centered-classroom.
• “10 Key Bible Verses on Leadership.” Crossway, 26 Sept. 2020, www.crossway.org/articles/10-key-bible-verses-on-leadership/.
• Valdes, Rosemarie, et al. “Further Examination of Youth Leadership Skills Predictors.” Journal of Leadership Education, vol. 18, no. 1, 2019, pp. 110-125.