Stories from Cananga Tree (15)

"On the first night of his grandmother’s visit, a small boy was saying his prayers, 'Please Lord,' he shouted, 'add me bicycles, cars, toys, ....'

'Why are you praying so loud?' his older brother interrupted, 'God isn’t deaf.'

'Yeah I know,' replied the boy, 'but not Grandma, right?'"

"The renowned fantasy and science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, 'People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within,' This metaphorical statement suggests that just as dragons represent the mysterious and unexplored, we should remain open to new ideas, experiences, and possibilities," said Cananga while watching Hasinda Amin speaking with the General08. The General's words were clear and easy to understand. There were two items came to Cananga's mind: 'I will be genuine' and 'the well-being of my people'. A great start. But, is it a 'restatement' or a 'confirmation'? Because there was a saying like this, 'Tell a man there are three hundred billion stars in the universe, and he believes you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it, and he has to touch it to be sure.'

"Sometimes, what seems fantastical might hold hidden truths. Dragons as guardians of nature remind us to protect our environment. Denying ecological issues can have dire consequences. By acknowledging and addressing them, we contribute to a healthier planet. Those who dismiss or ignore important truths or fantastical possibilities may ultimately suffer the consequences, even if those consequences are not immediately apparent. It encourages us to remain open-minded and curious, lest we miss out on hidden wonders or face unexpected challenges, probably that's what Le Gun means by her metaphor 'People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.' Ultimately, this concept encourages curiosity, courage, and mindfulness.

Time is like a tapestry; woven with the threads of countless memories. Fiction, Le Guin wrote, imagination working on experience, . A great deal of what we consider our experience, our memory, our hard-earned knowledge, and our history, is fiction. But never mind that. It's about real fiction—stories, novels. They all come from the writer’s experience of reality worked upon, changed, filtered, distorted, clarified, transfigured, by imagination.

'Ideas' come from the world through the head. The interesting part of this process is the passage through the head, the action of the imagination on the raw material. But that’s the part of the process that a great many people disapprove of.

Experience is where the ideas come from. But a story isn’t a mirror of what happened, Le Guin added. Fiction is experience translated by, transformed by, and transfigured by the imagination. Truth includes but is not coextensive with fact. Truth in art is not imitation, but reincarnation.

In a factual history or memoir, the raw material of experience, to be valuable, has to be selected, arranged, and shaped. In a novel, the process is even more radical: the raw materials are not only selected and shaped but fused, composted, recombined, reworked, reconfigured, reborn, and at the same time allowed to find their own forms and shapes, which may be only indirectly related to rational thinking. The whole thing may end up looking like pure invention. A girl chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a monster. A mad captain and a white whale. A ring that confers absolute power. A dragon.

But there’s no such thing as pure invention. It all starts with experience. Invention is recombination. We can work only with what we have. There are monsters and leviathans and chimeras in the human mind; they are psychic facts. Dragons are one of the truths about us. We have no other way of expressing that particular truth about us.

Your brain is always listening to hidden dragons, says Daniel G. Amen. How you think and talk to yourself, as well as self-concept, body image, emotional trauma, upbringing, and significant life events (such as enduring months of self-isolation during the coronavirus pandemic). Dragons influence your psychological health by saying whether you are enough—good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, strong enough, rich enough, and so on. When you’ve tamed your dragons and believe that you are enough, you will be happier and more confident. When you feel less than enough, your brain can give in to sadness, anxiety, and failure.

When you have solid relationships, a healthy family, a role or career you enjoy, and financial stability, your brain tends to do much better than when any of these areas are troubled. Dragons can become unhinged when difficult life situations, such as a global pandemic, relationship breakup or divorce, layoff, or death of a loved one, elevate stress hormone levels. When this circle is unhealthy, you are more vulnerable to illnesses, depression, anxiety disorders, and more.

A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but the attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years. Your conscious and unconscious brain expresses its aspirations, worries, fears, stress, love, joy, hatred, and happiness through your body’s reactions.

Your brain is always listening and responding to every thought you have, especially the stressful and positive ones. The thousands of thoughts you have every day are based on myriad factors, including the Dragons from the Past; genetics; past experiences; sensory input; dreams; what you had for dinner last night; and the health of your gut bacteria. Negative thoughts cause your brain to immediately release chemicals that affect every cell in your body, making you feel bad; while the opposite is also true—positive, happy, hopeful thoughts release chemicals that make you feel good. Your thought patterns can also have long-term effects. Repetitive negative thinking may promote the buildup of the harmful deposits seen in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease and may increase the risk of dementia.

Thoughts are also automatic. They just happen. Just because you have a thought has nothing to do with whether it is true. Thoughts lie. They lie a lot, and it is your uninvestigated or unquestioned thoughts that steal your happiness. If you do not question or correct your erroneous thoughts, you believe them, and you act as if they are 100 percent true.

If there was an invitation to choose between reading (a novel, for example) and viewing (Film or TV program), which one would you choose?

In general, almost all of us prefer viewing rather than reading. Some research show that a significant portion of the population does indeed lean toward viewing content. Several factors contribute to the preference for viewing over reading: Humans are naturally drawn to visual content. Videos, images, and infographics can convey information more engagingly than plain text; Watching a video or listening to audio can be faster than reading. Viewers can absorb information passively while multitasking; Visual media can evoke emotions more effectively. Facial expressions, body language, and music enhance storytelling; Videos cater to different learning styles. They provide an alternative for those who struggle with reading or have visual impairments; Visual content is highly shareable on social media platforms, leading to wider dissemination.

Individual preferences vary, but these reasons collectively contribute to the popularity of viewing content!

However, there is something interesting between 'viewing' and 'reading' in Le Guin's perspective. Reading is active, says Le Guin. To read a story is to participate actively in the story. To read is to tell the story, tell it to yourself, relive it, rewrite it with the author, word by word, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. Reading is a most mysterious act. It has not been replaced and will not be replaced by any kind of viewing. Viewing is an entirely different undertaking, with different rewards.

A reader reading makes the book, and brings it into meaning, by translating arbitrary symbols, and printed letters, into an inward, private reality. Reading is an act, a creative one. Viewing is relatively passive. A viewer watching a film does not make the film. To watch a film is to be taken into it—to participate in it—to be made part of it. Absorbed by it. Readers eat books. Film eats viewers. This can be wonderful. It’s wonderful to be eaten by a good movie, to let your eyes and ears take your mind into a reality you could never otherwise know. However, passivity means vulnerability; and that’s what a great deal of media storytelling exploits.

Reading is an active transaction between the text and the reader. The text is under the control of the reader—she can skip, linger, interpret, misinterpret, return, ponder, go along with the story, or refuse to go along with it, make judgments, and revise her judgments; she has time and room to genuinely interact. A novel is an active, ongoing collaboration between the writer and the reader.

Viewing is a different transaction. It isn’t collaborative. The viewer consents to participate and hands over control to the filmmaker or programmer. Psychically there is no time or room outside an audiovisual narrative for anything but the program. For the viewer, the screen or monitor temporarily becomes the universe. There’s very little leeway, and no way to control the constant stream of information and imagery—unless one refuses to accept it, and detaches oneself emotionally and intellectually, in which case it appears essentially meaningless. Or one can turn the program off.

Although there’s a lot of talk about transactional viewing and interactive is a favorite word of programmers, electronic media are a paradise of control for programmers and a paradise of passivity for viewers. There is nothing in so-called interactive programs except what the programmer put in them; the so-called choices lead only to subprograms chosen by the programmer, no more a choice than a footnote is—do you read it or don’t you? The roles in role-playing games are fixed and conventional; there are no characters in games, only personae. That’s why teenagers love them; teenagers need personae. But they have to shed those personae eventually if they’re going to become persons.

Readers don’t control the text: they genuinely interact with it, until they finally reach the answer. Viewers are controlled by the program or try to control it. Different ball games. Different universes.

Every man’s consciousness is constantly changing, says U. S. Andersen, is trapped at the knife-edge overlap of past and future, reacts rather than acts, is incomplete and partial, and eternally seeks itself, for since the mere state of being throws no light on that state, consciousness learns of itself through reaction to outside stimuli. If a man comes to believe he is unsuccessful, it is because he carries the impression he has been unsuccessful, and this conclusion, once adopted, inescapably molds him into the shape of the thing he believes, locks him in a prison of his own making.

Have you ever noticed that people who tend to worry end up worrying about everything? It does not matter what happens—worry is their reality. When they overcome their worry, another one immediately pops up. If you think about it, there is always something you could worry about—money, health, politics, the weather—the number of things is infinite.

Worry is a chronic condition that has no end, says Victor Levy. We all know someone who worries about everything, like if it is going to rain or if there is going to be traffic. Even if there is no traffic, they say, 'What’s wrong? Why is there no traffic?' Whenever you are anxious and imagining worst-case scenarios, you train your mind how to respond. Every time you complain, you are relating to the present moment as if it were your opponent.

Worry is like an infinite onion. You peel the onion, and the more it reduces in size, your line of vision changes. You are constantly peeling and peeling, however the onion always appears the same size. Whenever you peel an onion, tears come out of your eyes. Similarly, whenever you worry, your cells start crying. Anxiety has an impact on your whole system. If you tend to worry, you do not allow your cells to regenerate. Worrying, anxiety, and stress are the byproducts of most diseases.

Stress and anxiety cut off the connection of creativity from the universe to you. You enjoy any activity in which you are truly present. Get rid of the illusion that the circumstances are somehow imperfect. If you protest anything that happens, you are automatically blocking your power. When you are responsible for everything that happens, you get access to the power of now. The purpose of life is not in the future, but if you are going to look for it there, you will be looking on and on and on.

Your life is your universe, and it is created based on your perceptions. You create your reality by how you perceive yourself, how you see the people around you, and how you relate to your surroundings. Have you ever noticed that whenever you have a perception of fear, life is so boring? You do not experience anything new or exciting. Fear always makes predictable decisions. Decisions made out of fear tend to lead you nowhere. They do not allow you to investigate new ways to experience yourself, new directions you can go, and new adventures you could enjoy. Fear makes you want to hold on to familiar behaviors in your life. Fear is the enemy of growth. Fear is something that arises naturally under certain circumstances.

You tend to react to situations without understanding why. When something goes wrong, your subconscious programming reacts automatically and predictably. If someone or something gets you upset enough to change your internal state, you usually react compulsively instead of responding accordingly. This situation is the perfect opportunity for self-evaluation. If you do not get stuck in the reactive stage, you can obtain valuable information by observing what is triggering you.

The magic by which a man becomes free is imagination. By training himself to cast up mental pictures of the thing he desires, by resisting sensual stimuli, even envisaging the exact opposite, he tends to assume a factual position by his vision, for his vision then becomes his experience, rather than the sensual stimuli that moved him before. Consciousness always assumes a form to suit its knowledge of itself, and where such knowledge breaks beyond the limits imposed by sensory experience, man begins to grow into the image of the Secret Self.

Perfect action and perfect works stem from an inner conviction of the mental cause behind all things. A man changes the state of his outer world by first changing the state of his inner world. Everything that comes to him from outside is the result of his own consciousness. When he changes that consciousness he alters his perception and thus the world he sees. By coming to a clear understanding of the process and effect of mental imagery he is led irrevocably along the correct path to his goal. By working with this cause of all things—his own consciousness—he achieves infallibility in works, for inasmuch as his mental imagery propels him into action, that action is always true to the picture in his mind and will deliver him its material counterpart certainly.

Now, we return to the Islamic Calendar, the fourth month is Rabiʽ al-Thani, also known as Rabi' al-akhirah or Rabiʽ al-akhir. The word 'Rabi' means 'spring' and Al-thani means 'the second' in the Arabic language, so 'Rabi' al-Thani" means 'the second spring'. Rabiʽ al-akhir means the final spring.

Springtime is one of the four temperate seasons, succeeding winter and preceding summer. Spring is associated with love, passion, and new beginnings. The blossoming flowers and longer daylight hours evoke feelings of romance and connection. Spring is a season of renewal, bringing forth new life and fresh hope. Spring is like nature hitting the refresh button, bringing new life and energy after winter’s dormancy. Just as nature awakens from its winter slumber, spring symbolizes personal renewal and rejuvenation. It’s a time to shed old habits and embrace fresh perspectives.

Just as caterpillars transform into butterflies, spring represents personal transformations and positive change. Drawing from the cyclic nature of life, spring symbolizes rebirth and transformation. Spring’s arrival after the cold, dark months represents hope and optimism. It reminds us that even after difficult times, brighter days lie ahead. Spring flowers push through the soil despite harsh conditions. This resilience serves as a metaphor for overcoming challenges and finding strength within.

Just as plants bloom anew, we find hope in fresh beginnings. As temperatures rise, creating a conducive environment, spring encourages growth and development in both nature and ourselves. The return of warmth and light inspires hope, reminding us that brighter days lie ahead. In many cultures, spring is associated with fertility and reproduction. Animals mate, farmers plant crops, and life flourishes.

Spring signifies a clean slate, a chance to embrace positive change and leave behind the old. The vibrant colors, fragrant blossoms, and longer daylight hours evoke feelings of joy and celebration.

These metaphors capture the essence of spring beyond its literal beauty!

You live your life according to your beliefs, and the sum of your beliefs creates your conditioning. Your programming runs your day-to-day life. It shapes your thoughts, words, and actions. Your beliefs are not you! These programs contain assumptions about who you are, how you act in the world, and what you expect from yourself, other people, and life. But you can change them whenever they are not serving you. Replacing old programs is essential. Increasing awareness and discipline is the first step to improving your experience of life.

Our discussion continues in the next episode, biidznillah."

Before proceeding, Cananga recited a poem,

Kita ini peragu

[We are doubters]

Sering bertanya

[Ask often]

Tapi tak tahu apa atau siapa

[But don't know what or who]

Melempar kosa kata

[Throwing vocabulary]

Yang haus akan rasa, melontarnya jadi api

[Those who are thirsty for taste, throw it into fire]

Yang lelah pada asa, menusuknya jadi beku *)

[Those who are tired of hope, stab it so it freezes]

Citations & References:

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, 2004, Shambala

- Daniel G. Amen, MD, Your Brain is Always Listening, 2012, Tyndale House Ministries

- Victor Levy, Life is Setting Me up for Success: Free Yourself from the Illussion that You are not Enough, 2021, Balboa Press

- U. S. Andersen, The Magic in Your Mind, 1961, Thomas Nelson & Sons

*) "Peragu" written by Raidhatun Ni’mah

[Episode 16]

[Episode 14]

Bahasa

Stories from Cananga Tree (14)

"After having fun to follow along the music history lesson from the 1980s, the New Wave, a teenage girl asked her best friend, 'What’s an uncle’s favorite type of music?'

'Nephew-wave!' answered the bestie."

"There is already a mass of ideas available in the academic and professional literature about what leaders should do and how they think," said Cananga while resetting pieces on a chess board in the array. The game of chess is a good modern symbol of leadership. A leader must be able to see the big picture and have a vision for success. A leader must also be able to concentrate on the task at hand and not be distracted by side issues. The fundamentals of chess are strategy, concentration, and planning. The player must think ahead of several moves to succeed.

"Values are vital in educational leadership. If you approach your thinking about values by way of your experience of leadership or your reading about it, you may bring various preconceptions with you. ‘Values’ is not a technical term. In talking about values, we are talking about something which is part of the experience of everyone. You already in your life have a lot of experience of values, though you may not have spent a lot of time thinking about your values or articulating them.

When we are talking for the moment about how we use words, they can be used rather differently by different speakers. A value has to be something less tangible than a physical object: it might be justice, it might be our relationship with our family, it might be having a comfortable house, but it is not the house itself.

We are more likely to talk about values–actually using that word–when we think there is something of importance at stake. Values are not physical objects but ideas about what is important or what matters to us. Values can also affect what people do. If you value harmonious relationships within your family more than success in your job, or the other way around, this is likely to make a difference if you have to choose, say, whether to apply for a promotion that will take you further away from your home.

Values may be distinctive of an individual: perhaps some personal experience has given you an aspiration for your own life that other people do not share. But values can also be distinctive of a group. A religious community, for instance, may hold certain values which are different from those of other groups. Values are conceptions of what is desirable. ‘Desirable’ means something like ‘worthy to be desired’, and this may be different from what is desired. If you are a smoker, but you think you ought to give it up, then you will often desire a cigarette but what you think is desirable is that you stop smoking and cease to have a craving for cigarettes. Then being free of such a habit is one of your values–one of your conceptions of what is desirable. Values may be explicit or implicit. If you say that one of your values is justice or truth then you are making this value explicit. But in your choices and actions, you will be influenced all the time by what you take to be preferable or important, whether or not you spell out to yourself or anyone else exactly what ideas are influencing you. If someone says that something is important but does not act accordingly, then we refer to the idea of paying lip service to values.

Several writers on values in educational management have cited Kluckhohn's 'values' definition, 'Values are conceptions, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influence the selection from available modes, means, and ends of action.'

Most people think that there are many questions of values that cannot be reduced to personal preference. Suppose you came across someone who said he enjoyed smacking children, especially small children, and that he would take every opportunity he could find to do this. That is his preference. But if you want to get him to stop doing this, you surely want to do more than tell him that your preference is for him not to smack small children. You will think that he is doing something wrong, that he is offending against values that in some way are not just matters of personal preference. It is at this point that we are beginning to talk about matters of right and wrong, about values that people ought to follow regardless of their actual preferences. It is better not to assume in advance that the fields covered by ‘values’, ‘ethics’, and ‘morals’ or ‘morality’ are all the same.

There are various ways in which people may try to separate what is a moral or ethical matter from what is not. It may be useful to distinguish ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’. The term ‘ethics’ has some specialized uses. It is used to refer to professional codes or responsibilities, in the phrase ‘professional ethics’, though there is perhaps no good reason why the standard phrase could not be ‘professional morality’. ‘Ethics’ is also the name of the branch of philosophy that deals with matters of morality; in this sense ‘ethics’ is equivalent to ‘moral philosophy’. In distinguishing moral from non-moral matters, here are some considerations that may have occurred to you: Moral matters seem to be about how people are treated–how people behave towards each other. So judgments about one picture being better than another are not moral judgments; While moral values, like other values, are conceptions of the desirable, they often seem to be more than just that. We may want to say, for instance, that being kind rather than cruel is not just desirable–it is obligatory. We have the idea that morality is binding on people in ways that other conceptions of the desirable are not.

Morality, then, cannot ultimately be a matter of personal preference (despite what some people may say about it). If there is something that it would be right for me to do (even in the face of my preferences or inclination), or something that it would be wrong for me to do (though it might suit my convenience) then by and large the same things will be right or wrong for other people too (of course, personal circumstances may make a difference, but not all the difference).

Since morality is not a matter of personal preference, it is possible to argue about what is right or wrong. We expect to be able to give some sort of reasons to back up opinions about right and wrong. But at the same time, not just any kind of reason will make something a moral matter.

Values, as conceptions of what is desirable, can be shared among people. When a particular conception of what is valuable is shared quite widely within some group of people, we can say there is a consensus on it. Sometimes we see consensus as sufficient backing for a value. If a community collectively considers that something is to be done in a certain way, often, at least within that community itself, that will be sufficient reason for doing it this way. Norms get established within a community, and the community comes to expect conformity to its norms. While consensus is important, we can also see that an actual consensus within a particular community does not have to be accepted as the final answer on the question of where norms come from and how they can be justified. This is clear partly because there may be a different consensus in different communities. For instance, in some places it may be accepted or even expected that a person in a position of authority making a professional appointment will give some preference to his or her own associates or family members; in other places, this will be called nepotism and frowned on as violating norms of professionalism and equity.

People sometimes suggest that ethics is relative to cultures. What is certainly true is that different cultures are different from each other in some of their values and norms (that is part of what makes them different cultures). If consensus were the last word on whether particular norms should be followed, then we could accept that all norms are relative. But in fact, we can see that consensus does not have to be the last word because a particular consensus can be criticized. If, for instance, there is a consensus within a particular community that women’s place is in the home, then it is still possible for that consensus to be criticized by appealing to some other considerations.

One sort of consideration is an appeal to consequences. In this particular case, we might argue that a condition of society in which women’s talents are not fully used does not in the long run bring the best consequences for everyone concerned.

People sometimes think that appealing to consequences is not giving a moral argument. But when you are thinking about what you ought to do in some situation, wouldn’t you usually give some attention to what the consequences will be of one course of action or another? If you are thinking morally about what you ought to do, of course, you should not be concerned only about the consequences for yourself, but you certainly should be concerned about the consequences for other people who will be affected by your actions. We often consider that someone has acted irresponsibly if they have not taken the consequences for others into account.

The point about consequences is important in education, and not least in educational leadership, because education always has to have an eye to the consequences for students of one way of teaching rather than another, one syllabus rather than another, and so on, and educational leaders have to look to the consequences of their decisions for all the people they are trying to lead.

Education is a matter of some people deliberately exercising influence over others. This already makes it a matter of which judgments of what is morally good or bad can apply. Treating people in one way rather than another–especially when the people concerned are vulnerable, as children are concerned adults–is not just a matter of preference. There are obligations involved here. Society owes it to its young people to bring them up and teach them in desirable ways (that is why we say that children have a right to education, not just that it would be a good thing for children to receive an education). So the purpose of education is one that society has to pursue, and society puts much of the responsibility for pursuing that purpose onto schools.

Schools are not the only institutions that have responsibilities towards particular people, discharged on behalf of the wider society. We might say, for instance, that hospitals have such responsibilities, at least within a health service that is publicly run and funded. But there is a further point about the purposes of schools. Schools that are concerned with the general education of young people – unlike, say, a driving school or a swimming school – are trying to promote learning that is not ethically neutral. They cannot avoid, for better or worse, having an influence on the values, including the moral values, of young people; therefore they must do their best to influence these values for the better. This is a further dimension in which the purpose of schools is rightly considered a moral purpose.

When we are talking about leadership, to be able to pursue a moral purpose, a leader needs some sort of authority, but need not have the power of a despot. When we say that someone has authority, an issue about values is already implicit. In everyday discourse, authority is not always distinguished from power, but it helps to bring out the value issue if we make that distinction. What the notion of authority helps us to do is to distinguish between right and wrong exercises of power. ‘Authority’ is a value-loaded concept; roughly, it equals ‘legitimate power’. The idea of authority as legitimate power gives us a starting point in thinking about how authority relates to leadership. The exercise of power in human societies is very widespread and probably quite inevitable; almost anyone may be involved in the exercise of some power over somebody at some time (the twentieth-century French theorist Foucault has become particularly associated with the idea that power is very widely distributed). But, of course, some people have more power at their disposal than others. Leaders could not be leaders without the possibility of exercising some power (in the value-neutral sense, this only means that leaders are able to get other people to do what the leaders intend them to do), but if people are trying to exercise power over us we want to know if they are entitled to do that. When we recognize someone as a leader, we recognize that their exercise of power is legitimate; that is we recognize that they have, not just power, but authority over us.

Why, then, do some people recognize that others have authority over them? Many people in the world have exercised the power that others have recognized as legitimate simply based on tradition. But, in the modern world, tradition has increasingly been questioned as a source of legitimacy. Instead, we have systems of rules (including the legal systems of states) that give positions of power to the people holding certain roles, occupancy of those roles is subject to some form of qualification and the whole system can be seen to be justified by broader considerations such as the general welfare. ‘Bureaucracy’ – as a sociological term, not necessarily pejorative–is the general term for systems of this sort, and the kind of authority involved is ‘rational-legal’. It is part of a system of rational-legal authority that it is not an arbitrary matter of which people get into which positions. The system makes the occupancy of positions of authority dependent on some sort of qualification. People normally have to apply for a position of authority, in competition with others, and show that they are qualified to do the job, either by virtue of their experience or (increasingly in modern systems) by having gained certain formal qualifications.

It follows that, if the system is working well, everyone who is in a position of authority will be qualified for that position. Nevertheless, it is still the case that the authority that someone has by virtue of their position within a bureaucratic system does not automatically go with the actual power to get things done. If you gained your leadership position because you were recognized as a good teacher, this may be an element of traditional authority in action – this is the way it has generally been done. If you gained your leadership position because, even before you were in that formal position, people tended to look up to you and to take notice of your opinions, then it may be – though you are probably not the best person to claim this about your- self – that you have certain special personal qualities!

In the discourse of educational leadership in recent years, the idea of vision has become prominent. Perhaps the commonest use of the word ‘vision’ is to refer to the ordinary capacity for seeing; for instance, like many people, I wear glasses to correct a deficiency in my vision. Since vision in this everyday, literal, sense is a normal capacity of human beings it is not likely to be very helpful to a consideration of any special qualities needed in leadership. But it is possible to refine this ordinary notion of vision into something more special by making it metaphorical. Then, when we say that a person ‘has vision’, we mean that he or she has, not just the ordinary capacity of sight, but the ability, to a greater extent than most, to see how things could be. We might call this quality ‘imaginative perception’. In the context of schools, it could be the capacity to see the possibilities that are open in the future of a school, perhaps to see possibilities that others might overlook, and to see how the school might get from where it is to a desirable future. A head with this capacity might be described as visionary.

When the notion of vision is used in contexts of educational leadership it often has connotations both of the capacity to see something beyond what is immediately present–the current status quo–and of that which is seen–a representation of the future. When we speak of a person’s vision for her school, we are speaking of her picture of what it could be or will be like in the future. But to put it that way is to make it seem rather mundane. Anyone could have a mental picture of what a school will be like in the future, but in many cases, the picture might not be of a kind that would motivate or inspire people. If we use the term ‘vision’ for just any picture of what a school will be like, we will lose the sense that there is something special about a vision.

In educational contexts ‘vision’, like ‘purpose’, denotes that something is being aimed at. Also, like purpose, vision can give a sense of direction and motivation. But vision differs from purpose in that it presents a picture of how things will be at some point in the future, which purpose does not necessarily do. A sense of purpose might be focused on something relatively narrow, such as improving test scores or improving recruitment to the school. Or a sense of purpose might be broader but quite ill-defined–if, for instance, a head wanted to keep her school improving, but had no very clear idea of what the school would be like after a period of improvement. A leader’s purpose could even be to keep things much the same as they are if the leader considers that the way things are is already quite good. But to have this sort of purpose is not to be driven by a vision of how things might be.

Communities are healthy when they are learning; the definition of a community would have to include a capacity to grow and develop organically. There is a symbiotic link between schools and their communities—children. The school becomes a microcosm, a model, of the ideal for the community. Schools need to be successful with their communities, not despite them. Educational leaders are very well placed to provide leadership in the community—schools as institutions usually have very high social capital. They need qualities like vision, empathy, adaptability, and communication. They take a comprehensive, evidence-based, relational approach to problem-solving and play a crucial role in promoting equity and ensuring that all students have access to quality education.

Educational leadership involves applying knowledge and skills to transform communities and outcomes in various educational contexts. The impact of educational leadership is felt throughout schools, nonprofits, and private sector organizations. Effective leaders can transform whole communities through their meaningful work. Educational leadership is fundamentally concerned with values and is essentially aspirational. In many communities, schools represent the biggest single public investment and are the best-resourced organizations.

There is a profound ethical base to such leadership. At its heart are the principles of equity and entitlement. This is extended into the belief that a crucial component of the educational process is the fight for social justice. Economic, social, and cultural poverty is a major barrier to educational opportunity. Leadership in this context is about more than fighting discrimination—it is about the active promotion of a society based on positive acceptance and engagement. Leadership is a moral process firmly rooted in the viability and sustainability of communities. Leadership is thus an agency for social change, community renewal, and the creation of communities of learning—both formal and informal.

And before we continue to the next episode, let's build our hopes that even after completing a task or overcoming challenges, there’s still a path to discover or explore. In every ending, a seed of beginning. Though roads diverge and shadows play, we'll find our way. The journey continues, seeking new horizons. Even when we're done, we'll find out our way. Insha Allah."

Citations & References:

- Graham Haydon, Values for Educational Leadership, 2007, SAGE Publications

- Tony Gelsthorpe & John West-Burnham, Educational Leadership and the Community: Strategies for School Improvement through Community Engagement, 2003, Pearson Education

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