Learning to Lead Democratically: A Democratic Imperative for Leadership Preparation 97American democracy over the past decades has been devalued and dismissed in reform
proposals that “pit a romanticized view of the laws and logic of the market against the dis-
course of ethics, political agency, and social responsibility”(Giroux, 1992, p. 5). Reflected is a
new American naiveté that calls for “schools to be dispensers of an unproblematic cultural
tradition in which the emergence of cultural difference is seen as a sign of fragmentation and
a departure from rather than an advance toward democracy” (Giroux, 1992, p. 5). The respon-
sibility of determining the type of democratic society befalls the citizenry, both the adult citi-
zenry and the future generations of citizenry. Therein lies the critical connection between
education and society—the educating of a critical democratic citizenry.
For education leaders to address issues and problems of education and in particular public
schools, we must make the social responsibility of school leaders and teachers, and the role
that both public schools and higher education play, a high priority in the current discourses
concerned with the fostering democratic education for our democratic society. We must re-
visit, critically, their “wider political and social function” (Giroux, 1994, p. 31) in relation to
standing ideologies and political agendas that work against social justice and democratic prin-
ciples.
Necessarily, the role of education set forth by Dewey (1916a, 1927) must be envisioned,
in part, as the work of leader-preparation programs within schools and colleges of education.
Transforming public education must begin with transforming leadership-preparation pro-
grams, rethinking curriculum wherein learning to lead is inseparable from a critical attitude
that engenders “ingenuous curiosity to become epistemological curiosity, together with a rec-
ognition of the value of emotions, sensibility, affectivity, and intuition,” (Freire, 1998a, p. 48).
Leadership preparation must provide the student of leadership with the methodological exacti-
tudes necessary for authentic engagement in the cultural-political work of leading the educa-
tional enterprise in an increasingly complex and global world. to learn to lead in a society
that is increasingly culturally, linguistically, ethnically, and racially diverse, Cochran-Smith
(1995) argued,
[Educational leaders]... need opportunities to examine much of what is usually un-
examined in the tightly braided relationships of language, culture, and power in
schools and schooling. This kind of examination inevitably begins with our own his-
tories as human beings and as educators; our own experiences as members of particu-
lar races, classes, and genders; and as children, parents, [leaders] and teachers in the
world. (p. 500)At risk is whether schools and colleges of education are to serve and reproduce the exist-
ing society or to adopt the critical role of preparing “educational leaders, and others as en-
gaged and transformative intellectuals who engage rather than retreat from the problems of
democratic life and culture” (Giroux, 1994, p. 36). Education leaders as cultural workers and
public intellectuals in the university and school settings, engaged through a pedagogy of so-
cial justice, would “address the social, political, and economic conditions that undermine both
the possibilities of democratic forms of schooling and a democratic society” (Giroux, 1994, p.
36).
Backlash against the standards and accountability movements, widespread criticism of
NCLB, and public outcry from the education community concerning the deregulation of prac-
titioner preparation give voice to the educators' dissent as public education is further recalled
from its democratic imperatives. Pressing questions guide the current discourse, including,