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