How can schools better develop student leaders?

I believe that education should lead to a student’s full development and should be supported by ‘cura personalis’ or care for the individual. To help each student realize his or her full potential, to care for each individual, high schools should offer a network of academic, cultural, and leadership resources. This network starts with a faculty that is open, accessible and collegial and includes programs that will continuously invest in this network.

Cura personalis and full development. Together, these translate into awareness amongst the people who work in the classrooms, libraries, offices and special programs, taking that their primary responsibility is to help students meet the challenges they have selected or that have selected them.

Faculty and students need to work together in the common quest for new knowledge and understanding. This partnership takes shape, both in the classroom and outside the classroom, where students participate in active research projects, and in the mentoring relationships that develop and share endeavors.

To achieve excellence, a person must know their reason, how to acquire and sort information, how to imagine what can’t yet be seen, how to speak and write, how to translate knowledge into wise action, and how to be both faithful and brave.

No high school can teach all these skills and attributes, but people can learn them. Ultimately, the job of a high school is to ask the questions that lead to learning and so, to excellence; and to challenge students to discover who they are, what they are capable of knowing and doing, and how they want to live. Students should be able to confront these challenges each day in subject classes and interdisciplinary programs, all which should be designed to focus, improve, and transform.

A high school can only be successful when an individual employs the full range of the curriculum, the faculty and fellow students to become a reflective and effective person, all the while recognizing that growth occurs only when one is able to challenge one-self as a matter of practice.

"Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound. The man who does not shrink from self-crucifixion can never fail to accomplish the object to which his heart is set." - James Allen

No one wants to take Books to school anymore just Guns.

Sometimes I sit around and think about stuff that are happening in our society today. Overwhelmed by the amount of ignorance and selfishness that plague our community, I thought I'd share my thoughts and feelings on popular and not so popular topics making headlines today.

My biggest concern, is the rapid growth in school violence that has taken the popular role today among teenagers in Middle School, High School and Colleges. After following the recent events of school shootings and gun scares, I started asking myself:

• Why are so many kids today willing to take their own lives and the lives of other so randomly?
• What is pushing these, very young people with unlimited opportunities, over the edge?
• How come we don't see this coming?
• Why is nothing being done to prevent it from happening?
• How are these kids getting the guns? Where are their parents?

I know some of my questions might not seem realistic, but these were my initial confusion when repeatedly, CNN reports that another school has fallen victim to gun violence.

What ever happened to taking books to school? When did guns become the new substitute?

After following the developing stories i decided to take an approach at figuring out the commonalities that the attackers all shared. My study showed that friends (or lack of them), stress (family, school, etc), and anger supplied the motivation for most of these attack.

Friends:
Its clear that most of the people who commit to such acts were loners, anti-social or just outcasts in the eyes of their peers. I believe that this single reason (collectively speaking) determines how and when these malicious acts of violence and selfishness will occur.

We need to start pay more attention to young people and show that we are concerned about how they feel and how we can help them with their problems. My only hope in sharing my thoughts on this subject is that others who read it would feel as compelled as I do to help prevent school shootings. Let's reach out to the younger generation and be a FRIEND to them let's not just push them aside and classify them as outcasts.

And remember:

"Guns are like assholes, nothing comes out of them with a positive purpose."
- Mark Thomas

Disclaimer:
I am not the best writer and my vocabulary might be limited to a few adjectives and clever maneuvers for play on words, but I'm not trying to win a prize of my literature I want to inspire others to be positive and proactive leaders.