Page 30 - Educational Leadership in a Changing World

Marta Ambite et al.

Dewey pointed out that ‘The task of teaching certain things is dele-
gated to a special group of persons’ (1930, p. 9), among which, in our
view, could be the leadership of people. More specifically, exemplarism
is linked to educational leadership, in that leaders are likely to provoke
admiration and desires for emulation in others, due to their excellent
characteristics in different domains. However, at the same time, there
are a series of associated risks derived from the capacity for imitation
of negative exemplars. In other words, exemplarism can become a pro-
cess that reproduces evil in that it exposes profiles with at least one of
its pernicious characteristics to groups of individuals, provoking desires
for imitation in some of them and, therefore, causing the continuation
of evil. This is especially worrying in the educational field, where teach-
ers are role models who act in a setting that, in most cases, involves
children, adolescents, and young people. Therefore, their capacity to
influence others in their training process is very high (Ibáñez-Martín,
2017). It is worth asking what motivates individuals to admire figures
whose lives are far from being completely exemplary. To this end, Carr
(2024) and Croce and Vacarezza (2017) respond that the complexity of
the figures, the combination of factors, or mixed traits are aspects that
attract others, to the extent that the exemplary figures are perceived as
closer to their own reality. However, their explanation and normaliza-
tion do not exempt them from the obvious educational risks and draws
attention once again to the educational leader of reference, to the eth-
ical character of the educator, as they constitute the closest reference
figure.
It is obvious that planting a seed is not enough to grow a plant.
With it, a plant sprouts, sometimes with significant initial strength,
but the task of cultivation continues afterward. In this sense, the clas-
sic metaphor of education as cultivation and school as a garden, which
is still preserved in the names of educational institutions in some lan-
guages, takes on renewed meaning regarding educational leadership,
which requires a permanent responsibility over time. Such stability can
be rooted in its ethical foundation, which, as we have seen in this chap-
ter, is present in some of the most important challenges facing educa-
tional leadership today. This leads us to understand that leading peo-
ple and communities in our field of knowledge is more than a techni-
cal matter, reduced to the acquisition of practical skills. While these are
obviously relevant, the humanity inherent in educational action and its
purposes deeply permeates the nature of leadership today.

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