As Penny Bach Evins, the head of St. Paul’s School for Girls, an independent school in Maryland, told me, “It seems as if higher ed is looking for alphas,
but the doers and thinkers in our schools are not always in front leading.”
Harvard’s application informs students that its mission is “to educate our students to be citizens and citizen-leaders for society.” Yale’s website advises applicants
that it seeks “the leaders of their generation”; on Princeton’s site, “leadership activities” are first among equals on a list of characteristics for would-be students to showcase.
Helen Vendler, a professor of English at Harvard, published an essay in which she encouraged the university to attract more artists
and not expect them “to become leaders.” Some of those students will become leaders in the arts, she wrote — conducting an orchestra, working to reinstate the arts in schools — “but one can’t quite picture Baudelaire pursuing public service.”
Perhaps the biggest disservice done by the outsize glorification of “leadership skills”
is to the practice of leadership itself — it hollows it out, it empties it of meaning.
Whatever the colleges’ intentions, the pressure to lead now defines and constricts our children’s adolescence.
One young woman told me about her childhood as a happy
and enthusiastic reader, student and cellist — until freshman year of high school, when “college applications loomed on the horizon, and suddenly, my every activity was held up against the holy grail of ‘leadership,’ ” she recalled.
“And everyone knew,” she added, “that it was not the smart people, not the creative people, not the thoughtful people or decent human beings
that scored the application letters and the scholarships, but the leaders.
But if instead we seek a society of caring, creative
and committed people, and leaders who feel called to service rather than to stature, then we need to do a better job of making that clear.
