Educating Educators

A while ago I had a conversation with a friend on becoming a leader and raising up other leaders, with the question just being how do you do that? How do you mould a person in such a way that others will be inspired by their presence and gravitate towards the ineffable authority that each leader must carry?

The answer, he told me, was very simple. Firstly we must acknowledge that everyone has the ability to lead,  the only difference is in their capacity. We all lead in our daily lives, whether it be leading ourselves to the coffee pot in the morning or leading a group of friends in either physical, emotional or mental discussion. The term "capacity" here simply regers to how many people an individual can lead effectivley; some (like Nelson Mandela/Steve Biko/ President Kruger) have a great capacity and are usually found leading nations or corporations. Some people however have a smaller capacity and usually lead on a smaller, but no less important, scale ; for it is in scale alone that these differ.

The second point he made was that in training a leader, train them the way you yourself would have liked to be trained. This lets the training process continually change to best serve those using/doing it while still ensuring that the knowledge and experience of our existing leaders are passed on to the next generation. With the benefit of hindsight we can also correct mistakes our own leaders and trainers made adwell as include information we feel was left out that should be brought in.

But what, you ask, is the point of all this discourse on leadership; or is the goal merely to see words on a page that I release into the gaping maw and crowded platform that is the Internet? Simply this: at it's bare and  fundamental level Teachers and Educators are leaders of thought who usher and lead students from idea to idea, conclusion to conclusion, with knowledge as the eternal end-goal. They are leaders,  each with a capacity of their own, and so they can and should be trained as such.

In educating Educators then we must train them as we the existing ones would have liked to be trained; let their education be the sum of our education, experience and ideals. This training must remain open and flexible, as if you say one thing for the human race (and students in particular); say they are changing.

Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus or just a really cool popotamus?

The nature of things, much like the nature of truth, is inherently both subjective and intrinsic for it is a concept and what we conceive is our individual interpretation and understanding. Things are not the way they are merely because we perceive them to be because of our inherent fallibility as human beings.This fallibility is what keeps us in the continual pursuit of perfection (through ethics,religion or philosophy) and will see us chasing the ideal for a very long time still. 

Things are what they are because that is what we see them as. There is nothing about a tree or a rock that makes it so; we as subjective human beings chose to give it such a name and forever bound the image and idea of both rock and tree to these respective words. With this then it becomes obvious why human beings have different ideas, values and beliefs for they all extend out of our subjective perspective, assessment and quantification/codification of the world around us; for is man's instinct and drive not to understand that which is unknown? 

Perhaps I am assessing this issue of reality and the nature of things too deeply, so I shall leave these questions aside for now and depart with this simple quote:

"Sleep is no easy feat: You have to stay awake all day to do it" - Friedrich Nietzsche