April 2011

Leadership through Service Learning

I have been greatly influenced by Nobel laureate Herman Hesse’s novel Journey to the East. The story is about a group of seekers who go on a journey to visit the East in search of the ultimate truth. Midway, their servant Leo suddenly vanishes, throwing the entire team into complete disarray. As a result, the group disintegrates, quarrels break out, and everyone decides to call off the rest of the visit. Many years later, the narrator discovers to his utter surprise that Leo was the king of a kingdom – an unrecognized leader. Leo had provided the team vision and focused their energies towards the common goal. He kept the team together. He was a servant-leader.

Like values, leadership cannot be learnt through reading books, attending seminars, and listening to leaders. Leadership is experiential, transformational. Many don’t understand the significance and meaning of experiential. To know and not to do, is not to know. Likewise, it is not enough to be good, one must do good.

There are several forms of experiential learning - adventure and outward-bound, workplace situations, national military service, and community service. Of these, the latter provides the most effective tool for not only leadership development, but even academic achievement.

In our quest for creating leaders for tomorrow, schools face two challenges.

The first challenge is shrinking student motivation.

This explains why children are not growing to their full intellectual, emotional, and spiritual potential. Much of their world view revolves around immediate gratification, extrinsic rewards, social networking, and passion for Me and Now. As a result, the youth grow up being disconnected from their inner self and their society.

The second challenge is even more daunting. It is greed.

On graduating from schools and universities, the vast majority of students take up careers to solve the problems of the rich, and not problems of the poor. The problem of the rich is how to become richer? It is, therefore, not surprising that the foremost reason for the global crash of 2008 was greed. Closer home, greed has assumed dangerous proportions from one scam after another scam. Corruption is spreading like a virus and is sparing none – India’s top corporations, Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, leading journalists, politicians, senior officers of the armed forces, and civil servants. Each one of them is individually and collectively trying to solve the problems of the rich!

In my view, this is a failure of education. The purpose of education cannot be to succeed in examinations, seek admissions in prestigious colleges and universities, and secure six-figure start-up salaries. The purpose has to be much higher: provide “education for life, through life, throughout life” (Gandhi) to:

• Have a higher purpose that will give meaning to life.
• Be self-aware by developing the full cognitive, emotional, spiritual, and aesthetic quotients of the individual.
• Reach out and make the world a better place.
• Be responsible and caring citizens who serve society and those who are poor and marginalized

Schools must educate children to solve the problems of the poor, of sustainability. Students at Indus must be sensitized and equipped to find answers to the problems of the poor in India. These have reached staggering proportions.

• Climate change which is man made and we are paying price by tsunamis.
• How to share the dividing resources of the planet, wherein one planet is already consuming six planet worth resources.
• One-third of the world’s poor live in India. There are 650 million poor in India. Nearly 400 million go to bed every night hungry, no water, no toilet, and no hope for tomorrow. And 22,000 poor children die every day because of poverty.
• 35 percent of the world’s malnourished children live in India. 2.1 million children below the age of 5 die every year because of malnutrition, i.e., one death every four minutes.
• We have 32 percent illiterates. In the Community School, about 30 percent children are academically disadvantaged for one reason or the other. Of those who go to school, the average child spends 4.4 years, less than his counterpart in Pakistan at 4.9 years.
• Child labour is second highest in the world.
• Every 30 minutes one farmer commits suicide
• Life expectancy and gender equality is less than Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The Community School was set up for two purposes : to benefit the poor by giving them equal opportunities, and to motivate teachers and students to solve the problems of the poor. That is what we mean by creating leaders of tomorrow.

Is this happening?

Are we fulfilling the purpose of education?

Do we need to do more to integrate mainstream children with the under-privileged, by extending their range of interaction to their homes and villages?

Are teachers able to apply classroom theories in real-life situations today, and not after the students graduate?

We need to engage in debates and discussions to refine the Community service and Community School concept.

We need to review the entire idea of leadership curriculum. The mantra is simple: serve first; then only lead. The leader must have the desire to first serve the priority needs of his followers and those who are marginalized. When this happens great leaders are born. When this happens spirituality is born too.