Who Are You Educating Your Child To Be ?

Equip your child to be a leader
The journey of learning and leadership
Grow leadership skills
Educating future women leaders
Educating today's girls to be tomorrow's leaders
Strength and leadership
Leaders of heart and mind
Developing future leaders


These slogans jump out at me as I browse the local paper over a cup of tea. Schools advertising for students, public as well as private.

Educating your child to be the leader you want them to be


In my head I have an absurd picture of a school jostling with seven hundred leaders, no followers. Are parents really sending their children to schools strong in 'leadership' because they want their child to lead ? I'm struggling to understand wanting your child to be anything, other than his or herself.

I don't see education as a means of value adding, a way of shaping a child into something that pleases you.  It's a right, an education, and I aim to give my children an education because they have a right to it. Just as they have a right to housing and food and clean water and air. To give a girl-child her rightful education is particularly sweet.

What I don't do is educate them as a means of becoming. A leader, a doctor, a business woman, a politician, an artist, a town planner, a biologist, a mother, a sportsman, successful, wealthy; take your pick.

Children aren't becoming. They are. The life of a homeschooled seven year old holds as much intrinsic value as the life of a sixty year old High Court judge. Or a twenty year old garage mechanic. Education doesn't - and shouldn't - turn them into anything .

Education should offer them a series of skills, of tools, of information that they can use to grow their own lives, according to their own desires and the inner template they carry of what a good life looks to them. Leader, follower, iconoclast; how do we dare  assume to shape this, choose that ?