Educational Leadership: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,
Issues, and Controversies
A Meta-theoretical Review of J. Starratt’s
Ethical Leadership
Winter 2007
University of Alberta
PROLEGOMENON AND PERSONAL REFLECTION ON EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP
For me, the question, ‘What is educational leadership?’ is inseparable from the question ‘What
does educational leadership make?’ It is their inseparability that distinguishes leadership from
other undertakings, especially within the sphere of education. The question of the justification
for, and the necessity of the second question differs from the former question because it has
historically and traditionally arisen outside of the sphere of education 1. And yet it is a genuine
and not a rhetorical question; nor is it even merely academic. The fact is this question is
justified from the standpoint of educational and sociological theory. Serious objections can be
made in defense of a theory of educational leadership that is distinctively educational; yet to
ignore them would simply mean that we have already fallen prey to that positivistic “rigidity”,
and that over-emphasis on absolute certainty, which is so deplorable.
One such objection concerns the loss of clarity about the ends of education and schooling,
which is necessarily connected with the processes and problems of educational leadership. A
would-be school leader who has for the most part only encountered educational leadership in
its simplest and most direct form, and has been influenced by it in a direct, personal way, must
necessarily feel disconcerted, mystified, or even repelled by the sight of massive amounts of
theories on educational leadership, and his or her first acquaintance with the whole apparatus
of ideas, of reflection connected with the study of educational leadership. Instinctively the
student of educational leadership questions: “Why this immense apparatus of learning? What
is the practical significance of these subtle distinctions and those arid intellectual definitions?
What is the use of situating within a theoretical paradigm what it means to be a school leader?”
1
For instance, one need only read cursorily the business/economic literature to see the force of interest in
educational products. A more comprehensive analysis of this tendency is provided in Schultz, T. W. (1971).
Investment in Human Capital: The Role of Education and Research. The Accounting Review, 46(4), pp. 829-831.
1
The second thing I want to say is that educational leadership, beyond the institutional role
of the school administrator, is an intensely human endeavor that provokes a consciousness that
we have a compulsion, from our nature, and a service to render to humanity, due to the
compulsion, which can only arise within the context of learning. Historically and actually, being
human exists before being a school leader. To me, the fact is that if educational leadership is
anything at all, it is a function of being human, and as such, it is grounded in and actualizes
learning. It cannot, however, be taken for granted that there are, or should be, theories of
educational leadership; those theories presuppose particular kinds of educational leadership,
not only as facts, but as possibilities. From the standpoint of those theories, however, it is
obvious that we would never dream of asking whether there should be educational leadership,
schools, or whether educational leadership and schools are necessary. Educational theory
presupposes educational leadership and schools not only as facts but also as possibilities in
their own existence.
But when all this has been said, I have only provisionally defined my assumptions about the
place of being human in educational leadership. Further, my definition of its “place” is
obligated to start from the fact that schools are teaching institutions, whose work is to provide
an environment that possibilize and sustain conditions for ethical learning 2. My intention is to
illuminate through this review what I mean by the unique role educational, indeed, ‘ethical’
2
The view I am proposing of educational leadership as a distinctively human endeavor sees such leadership as
catalyzing ethical learning, which can be differentiated from other forms of learning by its constant concern with
ethical behaviour beyond immediate institutional learning contexts, indeed, in everyday social life. While other
socially and politically sanctioned institutional roles certainly can and do engage others in learning practices, I
contend that no other role is invested with the charge to support and foster learning so extensively.
2
leadership performs as it responds to intensely complex and constantly changing circumstances
and its coincidence with Starratt’s notion of ethical leadership. 3
THEORETICAL AND CONTEXTUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEM
The recent spate of ‘adjectival’ leadership has propelled the field of educational administration
and leadership to the forefront of contemporary educational thought (Greenleaf, 1977/1995;
Pollard, 1996; Burns, 1978/1995; Covey, 1991; Goleman, 1998; Handy, 1996,1980; Hodgkinson,
1991; Noddings, 1992; Sarason, 1990; Sergiovanni, 1990; Starratt, 1993). Adding to the extant
criticism of leadership as technical efficiency that reduces educational goals to a set of
mechanistic actions postured solely to improve student achievement to the exclusion of other
educational aims, Starratt conceptualizes leadership as an ‘ethical activity’ thus moving ethics
to a level of heightened educational significance.
3
From the background set out by the different voices in the field, I wish to add my voice, in hopes of producing a
tenable meta-theoretical critique of educational leadership grounded in a philosophical discourse. Certainly, it is
not easy to see a common principle in the convergence and divergence of epistemological, methodological, and
ontological perspectives. Every moment the mass of events in the social world are influenced by intangible
mechanisms and powerful forces of change, and each individual moment in history can only be thought of as
occurring because of the prevailing zeitgeist (German, ‘spirit of the times). My use of the term comes from Hegel’s
philosophy of history, and is more akin to the contemporary intellectual, political and social trends. That is, I
believe it is entirely inconceivable to break the interconnections between the administrator’s ethical work and the
general culture of the time. No doubt, the ‘human’ experience of the school leader is shaped by social institutions
and specifically by ideological discourses. Yet ideology is socially constructed, and, more precisely, it is actively
constituted through social and political struggle (Tucker, 1989). Starratt’s theory abandons the conservative
interpretation of ideology in favour of a theory which situates ideology firmly within material institutions, and
conceives ideology as a body of discursive practices grounded in economic interests and interpellates and sustains
individuals as subjects of market-driven managerial ideology (Starratt, 2004, p. 730). Elsewhere, Starratt has
warned about the danger of thinking that administrators and schools automatically assimilate desirable standards
as “ethically naïve, if not culpable” (Starratt, 1991, p. 187). Ethical leadership demands that leaders not only
attend to moral issues, but do so in particular ways. For instance, since the ethical leader’s actions are governed
and regulated by the moral axiom to do good, they are always already (to employ Derrida’s phraseology) caught up
in dilemma.
3
It is a peculiar move though, one that uncharacteristically conceptualizes leadership not a
dichotomy, as something that is ‘done to’ or even ‘done for’4 members of the school, its
community, or district supervisors.5 The reference to diffusion (Starratt, 2004, p. 8) is evidence
of a more comprehensive conceptualization of leadership: one that exists within the relations
of the school’s socio-political community. This is apparent, for example, when we note that
Starratt, in his abstraction of virtue, gives a closer description of virtue as a characteristic of
morals rather than rules (Starratt, 2004, p. 4).
The distinction is an important one since it is clear, in Starratt’s view, that virtue is not a
purely formal concept, but one that acquires definite content: “[t]his book provides an ethical
analysis of the virtues needed to infuse and energize the work of schools and hence the work of
leaders in schools” (Starratt, 2004, p. 9). There is a strong affinity between this centering on a
definite content and Starratt’s emphasis on “responsibility, authenticity, and presence”
(Starratt, 2004, p. 9). If we consider the terms in which Starratt frames the problem of
establishing an ethics of school leadership, we must appreciate the meaning of the embedded
narrative, which provides both a description and analysis of the effects of ethical leadership. In
his concern for demonstrating how, specifically, ethical leadership works, Starratt insists that
being an ethical leader is a matter of free will and situates his philosophical classification in the
normative domain to guide the actions of school leaders. According to Starratt, the book
offers,
4
For further explications of this dichotomy, see Moran, G. (1996). A grammar of responsibility. New York:
Crossroad Pub. Co.
5
The most controversial form of dichotomy in moral leadership is that presented in Habermasian deontological
ethics, re-scripted as a theory of communicative action, in which ethical action becomes a composite of two
opposing views of the ends of actions: namely, the possibility that a person’s actions may be wrong, even if they
lead to good results, and the corollary, that actions may be right, even when the consequences are bad (See,
Habermas, J. (1990). Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press).
4
…a perspective that might ground the moral exercise of…leadership. As such, the ethics of three
foundational virtues are offered for consideration and for choice as pragmatically normative for
educational leaders…because they represent an appealing, a reasonable, and indeed an uplifting
was to conduct business (Starratt, 2004, p. 6).
In his concern for a standardized “code of ethics”, that contains the “ethical topology” (Starratt,
2004, p. 7), Starratt prioritizes the regulative capacity of ethical leadership as a governing
principle. Naturally following is an attempt to affix and thrust morality upon every act and
every motive of school leaders.
The idea of virtues in educational leadership has raised all sorts of new problems 6, and
these are especially apparent when we consider the strong inclination on the part of
contemporary educational theorists to emphasize the work of school leaders in terms of the
polysemic qualities referred to earlier. Some of the new educational theories, for example,
contain an element of ambiguity in regards to their explanations of what leadership is (Glasman
& Glasman, 1997; Stewart, 2006). According to Castle’s review of Bennis and Nanus’ (1997)
work, “over 350 definitions of leadership have emerged over the past 30 years” (Castle, 2001,
p. 109). We should note in the first place that the idea of the dichotomization of leadership
does not originate in the nature of the theories themselves, but in the operational power of
those theories. It arises from the need for some intermediary between a “wide range of
stakeholders from sociologists to political scientists to business and management theorists to
6
For a thorough examination of this issue, see, Haydon, G. (1999). Values, virtues, and violence: education and the
public understanding of morality. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
5
educators” (Castle, 2001, p. 109). Thus, after delineating the contextual and historical shift in
the concept of leadership, Castle concludes her discussion with a statement about the status of
the question: “*w+ith a new emphasis on shared decision-making, site based management, and
collaborate communities, leadership is no longer simply the exclusive domain of the principal,
but rather a power to be shared throughout the school” (Castle, 2001, p. 110). The relations
instanced by Castle suggest that leadership is not necessarily concerned with a formally
anthropological choice between disparate socio-political prerogatives.
It is understandable that difficulties have constantly arisen in connection with the use of
administrator “choice” in the philosophical and educational scholarship relating to ethical
leadership, since this term always arouses associations of some sort of qualitative reduction of
the extensiveness of moral complexity which would make it peripheral and partial rather than
basic and total. Not only is this term so used in ordinary speech, but also in the contemporary
leadership literature in reference to moral options (Strike, 2007; Woods, 2005, p. 12). It is thus
understandable that also in the literature “choice” and “totality” are simply opposed as
contraries.7 But however much the usage of the word may have led to this misunderstanding, it
should be stated that without confession, I use the term in quite another way, and do not have
a meaning of a simple “this or that” in mind, a simple quantitative reduction. It is my hope that
this will become clear from the philosophical context in which I have framed my view of
educational leadership, that the idea which moral choice represents cannot be given up, though
I would add that we neither can or should lift any part of the idea out of its relation with
7
The extreme cost of failing to provide theoretical alternatives that isolate interpretive gambits is to risk in situ
viewing ethical dilemmas (i.e., opportunities) as obstacles, and coterminously risk free choice (See also Cooper, T.L.
(1998). The Responsible Administrator: An Approach to Ethics for the Administrative Role, 4th ed. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass Publishers). What validating ethics in a leadership framework does is critically affirm the necessity of
embedding the personal in the realm of social justice.
6
anthropological concerns, nor reduce the effect of the idea through a distinction between what
is and what is not a moral dilemma, through a distinction between formal and prescribed
meanings. It becomes possible to give full value to and evaluate correctly the main thrust of
Starratt’s concept of ethical leadership only when we realize that Starratt does not isolate the
idea of choice, but rather holds that it is included and involved in a school leader’s response to
issues as a de facto, nascent and impracticable anthropological imperative,
Authenticity is the human challenge8 of connecting oneself to a wider whole, of finding one’s life
in dialogue with this wider whole, of discovering that the deepest character of all beings…is their
relationality, their participation in the larger life around them….authenticity is an ideal that can
never be fully or permanently realized (Starratt, 2004, p. 70).
And again,
…authenticity as a virtue is always a relative achievement, always at risk, always in dialogue with
the other in actualizing itself, always amplifying or diminishing in the face of daily circumstances
(Starratt, 2004, p. 75).
Just as Starratt does not place choice and partiality next to each other as isolated entities
mutually limiting each other, I also do not delimit choice over against its effects9 but hold that it
is precisely the school leader’s humanness in his or her relation to others which makes the
8
Italics mine.
The instated effect, of course, is to invoke the proactive virtue of responsibility. On this point, Starratt argues
authenticity as the basis of proactive responsibility. This effect is also seen clearly, e.g., in Levinas, E. (1981)
[quoted in Chalier, (1993)], Otherwise than Being of Beyond Essence. London: Martinus Niihoff, p. 114:
“Responsibility for another is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it, it has not
awaited freedom, in which a commitment to another would have been made”.
9
7
urgency and seriousness of ethical leadership manifest. Although a reference to a school
leader’s humanness can never be ground for self-excusing or inaction when confronted with
moral choice, it is evidence of his or her responsibility: responsibility, even as the school leader
works within the lateral relations of other humans.10
Attention has repeatedly been given in the theoretical literature, and not without reason, to
the fact that at issue for ethical leadership is some static relationship between education and
democracy. Precisely in this relationship between education and democracy the preservation
of democracy shows itself most clearly as preservation, for it is here that we become conscious
first of all of how ethical leadership affects the work of schools. There is every reason for us to
reflect on just this relationship. The preservation of democracy has often been interpreted as
the preservation of a relatively stable yet evolving concept,11 but actually it manifests itself in a
much more dynamic way in the various sorts of relations between people. Furman and
Starratt’s (2002) analysis revealed at least ten publications addressing this issue that have
emerged over the last two decades. 12 I shall not here analyze more closely the divergence of
opinions and theories about democracy. It is clear, in any sense that there is both need and
10
Hence the always concrete content and reference of responsibility is one that emerges theoretically and
existentially as an interstitial position, which, paradoxically, does not cancel its own effectiveness. It is perhaps an
idea that is necessarily more or less contradictory. Todd attempts to reconcile the contraposition (See Todd, S.
(2003). Learning from the other Levinas, psychoanalysis, and ethical possibilities in education. SUNY series, second
thoughts. Albany: State University of New York Press) by placing emphasis on the positive and fundamental
meaning that relational responsibility imports: “responsibility is not located within a subject. Instead, involved in
the initial susceptibility I have to the other, responsibility comes from the other and emerges out of the difference
that structures the human relation—a relation that does not presuppose that self and Other are the same. There is
always only a self and an other, not two selves or two others that are interchangeable, for this would imply a
knowledge, a thematization, an understanding that ‘we’ are all the same” (p. 109).
11
This emphasis can be found in many classical and contemporary theoretical views; in the latter case in a context
of concern for a more rich conception of democracy, Woods argues that “a rich conception of democracy requires
acknowledgement of a foundational human capacity for shared ethical insight. This is conceptualized as ethical
rationality, which, it is proposed, is foremost amongst four rationalities that comprise democracy” Cf. Woods, P.A.
(2006). A democracy of all learners: ethical rationality and the affective roots of democratic leadership. School
Leadership and Management, 26(4), p. 323ff.
12
Furman, G. & Starratt, R. (2002). Leadership for Democratic Community in Schools. Yearbook of the National
Society for the Study of Education, 101(1), p. 111.
8
justification for such theorizing in Starratt’s view. This is especially apparent from the fact that
Starratt relates ethical leadership to democracy distinctively, and localizes it in the work of
schools,
The moral challenges that schools confront are enormous. Nothing less than the quality of
Western civic life and the international emergence of a coalition of democratic nations whose
commitment to global social justice and mutual collaboration are at stake (Starratt, 2004, p. 4).
A later indication of the same theoretical orientation is provided when Starratt, referring to
Cooper’s theoretical perspective on the role of the public administrator, overlays his school
organization concerns with Cooper’s, thus calling attention to the,
…administrators’ moral responsibility to transform bureaucratic and organizational structures so
as to fulfill the mission of service espoused by public agencies seeking to operationalize
democracy in civil society (Starratt, 2004, p. 8).
The fact already emerges in a striking manner when Starratt writes about interpersonal ethics
actualizing the work of “[a]dministrators, teachers, and students” (Starratt, 2004, p. 9) through
the mutual involutions of the three virtues. Starratt’s concept of ethical leadership, so to
speak, forms a bond between different theoretical junctures, between distinct
conceptualizations that resist unification. Admittedly, Starratt’s version of leadership does, in a
sense, arrive at a certain unity of leadership. The idea of resolving the dichotomy rests not at
all on a fortuitous preference for a dichotomy but rather finds its origin in the problem of
9
mediating between the trichotomy of Starratt’s virtues. Indeed, in reference to the content of
ethical leadership, no tension exists for Starratt since, “*t+he virtues of responsibility,
authenticity, and presence interpenetrate and enrich one another” (Starratt, 2004, p. 9). It is
also certainly possible that, morally speaking, the relations Starratt outlines will help repel the
likelihood of a tendentious moral relativism,13 but the reason for my tentative rejection of this
conclusion lies exclusively in the anthropological character of the work of school leaders, as
appears all the more from the fact that Starratt appears to have developed his concept of
ethical leadership first in a theological context, which presumably should have been rejected by
the secular academic disciplines. The problem of moral relativism may also occur, of course, in
a dichotomistic approach, though it can hardly be denied that in Starratt’s trichotomistic
“virtues,” mediating the “inner values of the individual and his or her specific commitments
within the complex social life of the modern world” (Starratt, 2004, p. 28), appears much more
openly.14
13
See Starratt, R.J. (2004). Ethical leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, p. 6, in which he argues that
“*r+ather than a relativistic ethics in which everyone is free to decide for themselves, these are norms and virtues
by which members of a community bind themselves to a moral way of living because they seem both reasonable
and necessary to promote a richly human and civil public life”.
14
The openness referred to above is one that has led to various views of educational leadership, particularly when
we see the convergence of judgments in the leadership literature regarding just how educational leadership ought
to be addressed within a postpositivistic framework (See, Palestini, R. H. (2003). The human touch in educational
leadership : a postpositivist approach to understanding educational leadership. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press).
This openness does indeed point to a kairos time. On a historical note, the word kairos (καιρός) is etymologically
of Greek origin and is a reference for time. In contrast to chronos, which typifies ordinary, sequential, or
chronological time, kairos signals a time of crisis and opportunity, possibilities and decisive action. Although kairos
has its classic use in theology, I use it here in the secular, pragmatic sense of ‘time of opportunity’, which extends
an invitation to act for justice in our time.
10
THE MEANING OF ETHICAL LEADERSHIP IN EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION
When we use the phrase “ethical leadership,” most of us think immediately (and perhaps only)
of the school administrator who does the right thing. This image is solidified by the idea of a
choice between several conflicting value options that might very well be seen to constitute an
“ethical dilemma”. Taking his definitional point of departure from Kidder (1995), Starratt
warns, however, that this typology of an ethical dilemma is not an ethical dilemma at all, for it
lacks a basis in the kind of ethical framework that discriminates between a “virtue ethics” and
the “moral orchestration of competing values” (Starratt, 2004, p. 8). If we examine Starratt’s
view regarding ethical leadership under a critical lens then, it is unlikely we can ever really
understand it without a consideration of the special urgency and importance he gives to issues
of social justice (Starratt, 2004, p. 4) which pose more complex and dynamic alternatives to
classical ethics theory. What has to be appreciated in this is the close identification of
intelligibility with a foundational ethics. For to lay out a relational structure of the school
administrator’s human capacity is not to a priori limit our investigation of the concept of ethical
leadership.
It is understandable enough, however, that attention needs to be given first of all to those
passages where the nature of ethical leadership is dealt with specifically, or where its meaning
for social justice is directly considered. I want to begin, then, with an examination of the
passage in which Starratt speaks about the work—to return to a familiar theme—of the
administrator, for it is in this work, that the practical life of the leader can best be
contemplated. What precisely is the work of ethical leadership? According to Starratt,
11
The work of educational leadership should be work that is simultaneously intellectual and moral;
an activity characterized by a blend of human, professional, and civic concerns; a work of
cultivating an environment for learning that is humanly fulfilling and socially responsible (Starratt,
2004, p. 3).
We encounter a similar, but perhaps even more complicated emphasis on social responsibility
in connection with the use of the concept of the leader’s work. This term is later used by
Starratt in the context of the adaptive capacity of schools:
Leadership is then seen as mobilizing adaptive work,15 which is understood as the learning
required to address conflicts in the values people hold or diminish the gap between the values
people stand for and the reality they face (Starratt, 2004, p. 61).
While this statement, in measure, represents a fairly complete and comprehensive single
commentary on the work of ethical leadership, it certainly cannot stand in isolation from other
passages that might shed additional light on the work’s ‘human, professional, and civic
concerns.’ The statement of Starratt on the learning required by leaders is undoubtedly
intended to emphasize, and not elide, the fact that working towards social justice requires
addressing issues of conflict. This is especially apparent when Starratt remarks, not in apposition to
theorist who see conflict as a threat to the value of consensus, that,
[t]he quest for harmony, however, must acknowledge the necessity and desirability of conflict,
for it is through conflict that the voices and the truth of cultural and ethnic identities are
15
Italics mine.
12
articulated and legitimated. In this way, plurality16 comes to be not only tolerated but revealed
as vital to the humanity of the community” (Starratt, 2004, p. 52).
This is made clear also, from the idea of ‘addressing conflicts in the values people hold’. I too,
affirm a relationship between ethical leadership and social justice, and hold that conceptions of
ethical leadership too often privilege consensus formation over conflict and differences. As a
corrective move, I would like to put forward that the element of intersubjectivity is a useful
category for redressing the problem of achieving consensus in the context of difference. In
Sorrell’s phraseology, that consensus can be built among actors with different agendas is
entirely dependent on unconstrained discourse, or, the “willingness to take the other persons
perspective and willingness to suspend self-interest so that the better argument can rationally
create consensus” (Sorrell, 2006, p. 138). For me, leadership is intensely personal, and without
acknowledging the subjective reality of the school leader, and the intersubjective realities of
the leader’s relationship with others, one cannot fully take into account what it means to
engage critically in the work of social justice.
The ontological requirement for creating and sustaining trusting and respectful
relationships between the leader and others as a basis for all moral decisions is apparent, when
16
It is important to make the simple observation that plurality and pluralism are not at all identical, and that a
reference to the ‘voices of cultural and ethnic identities’ does not necessarily imply a pluralism. Trichotomy and
dichotomy have this in common, that neither is to be rejected merely because it distinguishes several aspects in
the work of educational leadership – any more than we can say that the trichotomistic dimensions of Starratt’s
responsibility framework (which, incidentally, is grounded in the virtue of authenticity Cf. Starratt, 2004, p. 65, a
priori imply a splitting of the leader’s work into conflicting parts. Earlier, I remarked that Starratt’s version of
leadership arrives at a certain unity of leadership (this work, p. 5) A certain pluralism can be spoken of, for
example, in Starratt’s narrative in which he describes Roosevelt Middle School as having “a decidedly multicultural
mix of students” (Starratt, 2004, p. 13), without implying that Starratt’s intention is an opposition, a pluralism,
between members of the school community. Indeed, plurality and trichotomy do not exclude harmony and unity,
but are oriented toward it. Indeed, plurality in the school community becomes pluralism only when there is a
polar tension, a social separation—and coterminously, alas, concomitantly, an inner separation in both the leader’s
work and identity—which destroys the essential unity in the concept of ethical leadership.
13
we note that Starratt in this regard agrees closely with William Foster that the view of the
school leader as a single individual working towards the good of others does not give an
accurate description of what moral leadership actually is. Thus, in describing the necessity of a
movement towards justice, Starratt points to the “inadequacy of tradition” alone and hence the
need to understand the requirements of justice and governance “from both tradition and the
present effort of the community to manage its affairs in the midst of competing claims of the
common good and individual rights” (Starratt, 1991, p. 193). Foster’s thinking supports
Starratt’s idea about the conjunctive nature of ethical leadership. In his words, “leadership is
communal and shared…leaders exist only because of the relationship attained with followers”
(Foster, 1989, p. 57). The ‘social justice’ turn that both Foster and Starratt give to their attempt
to ground leadership in ethical practices is evident where they concede leadership as
“fundamentally addressed to social change and human emancipation, that it is basically a
display of social critique, and that its ultimate goal is the achievement and refinement of
human community” (Foster, 1989, p. 48). In support of this view, Starratt conceives of
educational administration as a moral enterprise and so sees the work of administrators as
school reformers engaging in social justice issues: “social justice and mutual collaboration are at
stake” (Starratt, 2004, p. 4).
ETHICAL LEADERSHIP IN THE SOCIAL JUSTICE SCENE: SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS
The decisive question here is whether ethical leadership, in its use of anthropological concepts
intends and means thereby to give positive statements on the composition of being human, or
14
whether it makes use of anthropological concepts in a very free and imprecise manner,
intending by means of them to refer to the leader’s humanity in a holistic sense. The criticism
by Burns (1978) that an overemphasis on the role of power has distorted the ability to see
morality and ethics in the work of the leader is not simply directed against leadership as a thing,
as such, but rather towards leadership as a relationship,
[i]t lies in seeing that most powerful influences consist of deeply human relationships in which
two or more persons engage with one another. It lies in a more realistic, a more sophisticated
understanding of power, and of the often far more consequential exercise of mutual persuasion,
exchange, elevation, and transformation – in short, of leadership (Burns, 1978, p. 11).
Opposition to the idea of leadership as a thing is more strongly found in Starratt’s anthropological
emphasis, which rightly denies that leadership is anything other than a “human vocation of being true to
what one is, of being fully human” (Starratt, 2004, p. 71), and thereby to delimit a priori all
investigations into the structure of the human work of ethical leadership. It opposes the idea that all
the authentic work of the school leader can be forced into a dichotomy, into two substantial categories
(i.e., leadership as something done “for” or “to” others) as if we could arbitrarily separate the
insolubility of being human from any other social role, including being a leader. The trichotomy of
leadership “for”, “to”, and most importantly “as” averts this tendency, for it places the school leader on
an equitable plane with those he or she works with. This is clear from Starratt’s statement that claiming
“authenticity as the justification for narcissistic self-preoccupation is to miss the point of freedom”
(Starratt, 2004, p. 70).17
17
Freire was perhaps the first to expostulate on the problem of narcissism in this sense, which he framed in terms
of malefic generosity. He writes, “It happens, however, that as they cease to be exploiters or indifferent spectators
or simply the heirs of exploitation and move to the side of the exploited, they almost always bring with them the
15
One of the most important problems with which we have to deal with in our reflection on ethical
leadership in particular, or even education in general, and one which constantly recurs, is the problem of
freedom. The problem has aroused innumerable discussions, not only among philosophers, but also
among theologians, social scientists and now, educational theorists, and the passion with which
controversy is often carried on is an indication of the fact that in this problem we deal not with some
unimportant aspect of human life, but rather with the whole human in his or her total life. Though this
freedom was usually thought of in terms of freedom of the will, nevertheless it was human freedom that
was under discussion, the freedom of the human being who chooses and acts and who follows his or her
way through life in “freedom”. There is no doubt though, and alternately no intent on my part to deny
that there are various factors in education which limit freedom.18 However, for ethical leadership to
accomplish social justice is to take the stance that the more freedom is endangered, the more it must be
valued and held as an ideal, and, sometimes, brought forward as a program, and embodied in schools
through the network of relationships as a preventative against those things which can endanger
freedom. It is not without a very deep meaning that I call upon those who would take up ethical
leadership to do so in ways that enable ethical learning, both self-reflexively and intersubjectively.
marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people’s
ability to think, to want, and to know. Accordingly these adherents to the people’s cause constantly run the risk of
falling into a type of generosity as malefic as that of the oppressors. The generosity of the oppressors is nourished
by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Our converts, on the other hand,
truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the
executors of the transformation. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people
is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in
the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust”
(Freire, 1970, p. 46). The sense I have of this statement is authenticity in contrast to prevarication. It is a sense of
being with others, in presence, language and in thinking, which is self-characterized by praxis.
18
Starratt speaks without hesitation about this characteristic of school organizations: “schools as organizations
impose a disciplined process of learning and interdependent structures for producing and enacting knowledge
knowledge…In other words, schools constrain the freedom of teachers and students” (Starratt, 2004, p. 78). It
appears clear to me, however, that this is not necessarily the real intent of schools. Starratt discusses this issue in
his chapter on the virtue of authenticity.
16
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