Leadership and the modern Prince

Machiavelli wrote The Prince to articulate principles of medieval leadership, in which legalised political violence was accepted as normal. Antonio Gramsci wrote from prison as Mussolini's political prisoner "The Modern Prince", set in 1930s Italy (see earlier post on Prison Notebooks, PN). Here leadership is shown as a mixture of consent and force. Consent is needed by key stakeholders - the army, the police, the judiciary for example. Popular consent of the majority is helpful when force has to be exerted against a minority. The implications of this balance in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s was obvious to anyone with even a casual understanding of Nazi and Fascist policies. Gramsci, a Marxist, was in favour of democratic leadership.

I am concerned here with applying the idea of a modern Prince to contemporary leadership issues, including those in education. The leader can offer direction (forced or negotiated) and/or intellectual and moral leadership (PN:57). Leadership in education can be centralised to an individual or devolved to several layers. Parents and staff may be interested to ask whether the current situation is by consent or fiat, and the extent to which consent is sought - that is stakeholder views are valued. This suggests how much ownership the stakeholders feel in the status quo. Pupils are also major stakeholders. We might therefore ask on how the balance between force and negotiation is established, especially in the context of dealings with pupils. A school or college can only run with pupil/student consent (that consent might be freely given or grudging) but they could by sheer numbers sabotage the management of education by refusing to take part. The balance between management by force, by grudging consent and by freely-given consent might be used as a health check for the institution, and strategies to move the balance upwards devised and maintained.
Like the distinction between state and civil society, a school balances central power (the headteacher) against stakeholder competence and enthusiasm, the school equivalent of civil society, where many people work towards the public good. The more these are in balance, the healthier the institution. Leaders in education therefore need to devote energy towards nurturing bottom-up quality, and cannot achieve a quality organisation unless they do. They also therefore need to be the kind of people, in terms of personal qualities and attitudes, to do this well. Then the leader offers negotiated direction to the organisation, without which it is rudderless. The authority vested in the leader rests squarely on the quality of the intellectual and moral direction offered. Direction as to be owned democratically; but it also has to be fair, ethical, properly evidenced, securely conceived and suitably flexible. This then is the person specification of The Prince in education, that is the headteacher, the College Principal the Vice-Chancellor, devolved leader, head of service, or government minister. Today, they should not be bringing in the cavalry to kill opposition but negotiating a win-win situation.

From a school perspective, this means management by motivation rather than by compulsion, force, punishment, and expulsion. From a state perspective, it means working to narrow the gap between the many thousands of young people in prison or detention in Britain, and the remarkable figure of only 3 in Finland. For both school and state, anti-social activity is remedied by appropriate education and not by force.