“Leaders become great, not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others”
– John Maxwell
At the age of power and position, leadership is a word often spoke off… but not known off.
Today as the standard of intellect and worth fall up on the position one held, the true value of being a leader is lost.
From a tender age we are educated how to lead. It may not seem obvious but the smallest tasks given to preschoolers are in the intention of teaching them the basic of fallowing and being fallowed.
In elementary the weight of leading is at its peak. It is when teachers appoint leaders for different activities such as cleanings, group reporting and so on. It can even come to appoint that there will be a ‘mini-teacher’ that will supervise the other students when the teacher is preoccupied. It this time of their lives students are shaped for roles that may be their paths in the future.
And as a student step up to high school, the task of being a leader becomes vaguer and a bit underrated. It is when it seemed that being the “teacher’s pet” gets old. As they reach the adolescence age they become more inclined to being the underman, for being so, ensures less responsibility. It does not prove that high school students are less responsible or anything of such idea.
In Collage, it is more on ‘a man for himself’. If you want to get by and pass, you need to fend for yourself. Leading is optional and non- obligatory. Leaders’ only surfaces at given cases or ordeals where it is required. But aside from that it is more on a local arrangement of classes rather than on inter-school.
The pattern up above does not prove that as the older someone gets the less they become a leader. It just simply dies in them. Leadership takes more than just effort, it takes compassion and idealism. With one of the two lacking one cannot be a true leader. And as someone gets older their priorities becomes more on personal, in turn, the compassion usually dies first.
Being a leader does not prove that one is better than the rest. One cannot lead by oneself. And being a leader is not a solo job, it is part of a bigger picture, a pixel of the whole.
By: Annie C. Bugay |T-I | Limay National Highschool
