“For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.”

– Astronaut Donald Williams

All innovation is impossible, and often heretical, before it becomes inevitable and commonplace. Experience of example is often our most transformative teacher as direct experience reaches out to dissolve intellectual preconceptions and plants something far fuller and more profound. Though perhaps analytically speaking nothing new is added to our knowledge, our knowing is now undeniably visceral, emotive, even existential, and rapidly our thoughts reform around this new foundation.

“When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change… it comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for Man.”

– Astronaut Russell “Rusty” Schweikart.

It is almost equally ineffable, this “sense of possibility” which seems to be at the very heart of our movement. Divorced from experience it rapidly becomes an empty symbol, another strategic chess piece to be incorporated in our administrations and communiqués. Yet born of experience it is a powerful guide for the movement, leading the inquiry between awareness of the deep injustice we are called to address and the profound solutions which must inform our actions.

Ten days ago I stood in a room with eleven thousand others deeply engaged in a bold and ambitious struggle over what they see as the civil rights issue of our generation- a real, profound and systemic education revolution towards access, equity and opportunity for all. On stage were leaders who had broken through and created a small part of the world where poverty wasn’t destiny; it was a classroom, or a school, or even part of a system, where the fact your parents were poor, or uneducated, or missing, this fact didn’t decide whether you would love to learn, whether you would dream of futures to be realised, whether you would go to college and access economic, political and cultural influence in shaping your life and your society.

In this room of eleven thousand core members, alumni and partners, and while at a charter school at southernmost limits of Baltimore, and in conversation with a truly impassioned Associate working with children in the slums of Mumbai, and before many of the rousing and informative speeches and reflections and performances that you can see for yourself online, in these and a thousand other moments a sense of possibility arose in my view. A sense that there is an answer to the most intractable problem in our society and that we, individually and collectively, are critical to providing it.

But we don’t need to believe anything. We don’t need to believe that the classrooms with or without charts on the walls, or uniforms, or cheers, or with or without signs on the doors that say Oxford or Yale, we don’t to need to believe that they are better.  We don’t need to believe that schools systems that reward teacher performance with pay or with tenure are better, or that those who publicise or privilege test results are better. We don’t need to believe in a program or a movement, a pedagogy or a practice… We just need to look at the impact, the outcomes, look at what it does to address an injustice for which we would be right to be outraged.

We need to peer beyond the layer of noise, beyond the obligatory response of denial or delay or distraction and inquire into the very facts. Because there are some amazing things in the world out there. It is too different, too beautiful and too cruel to be all the same. Somewhere there are pearls of wisdom, somewhere there are moments of genius. One corner contains a piece of this precious puzzle, in an unlikely neighbourhood another. They are out there and they are being put together right now. How many exist, even within this room, and how many will be created within the classrooms of our Associates or their students?

“Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand”.

-Astronaut Neil Armstrong

Reflections on Teach For America’s 20th Anniversary Summit. View more summit session videos at vimeo.com/​tfa20years.

Given the profile of the audience and the nature of the organisation that has kindly invited me to chair this remarkable event, it might be unfair of me to speak seemingly against the concept of youth leadership. However, as I’m just under thirty and a proud alumnus of AIESEC itself, I feel I have the license to avoid the necessary “motherhood and apple-pie” statements about “free spirits” and cut to some of the serious challenges facing youth leadership. I will start by briefly highlighting two examples, one historical and one contemporary, that demonstrate some of the strikingly real dangers that youth leadership can fall to. From these, I will generalise four core obstacles that leaders must wrestle with in order to avoid such disaster. Finally, I shall describe what the world might learn from youth leaders should they master their puzzle of immaturity before the dreary and dangerous acceptance of age befalls them.

Case 1: Youth “Red Guards” in China’s Cultural Revolution

In the year that followed May 1966, a movement of students and young people would begin by denouncing the administration of their local university, grow to over ten million members drawn from almost every school in China, and just as rapidly be forcibly repressed by the national Army. In these twelve short months, a campaign of terror led by these “Red Guards” would result in hundreds of thousands dead and disabled, large swathes of political arrests from every sector of society, a large percentage of historical sites destroyed, and would firmly establish the personality cult of Mao Zedong.

Chairman Mao had quickly recognised the potential that youthful disdain for establishment, limited critical thinking and boundless ideological energy would offer his “cultural revolution”. Within days of the first Red Guard formation he and his political organs encouraged the youth to embrace their “right to rebel”, directing them to revitalize the revolutionary spirit of the Chinese Communist Party as they saw fit, and to attack the ‘Four Olds” of Chinese society (old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas). Mao himself gave validation to the destruction stating that mass purges and all such related social and political phenomena were justified and right.

“Freed from parental and societal constraints, youths, both girls and boys, had been unleashed to perpetrate assault, battery, and murder upon their fellow citizens to the extent their barely formed consciences permitted” (Mao’s Last Revolution, Macfarquhar &Schoenhals, 2006).

Once Mao had consolidated his political power the Red Guards were viewed as a liability. They were disempowered, actively suppressed and ultimately exiled through the “Down to the Countryside” movement, in which millions of young urban Chinese were resettled in rural areas. Much of the youthful idealism turned to disillusionment, but not before it had caused massive death and untold political, economic and cultural damage.

Case 2: Julius Malema, President of the ANC Youth League

The South African revolution, in the ending of the apartheid state, is striking in what it lacked of China’s cultural revolution. There was no massive bloodletting, demagoguery or savage persecution. Instead it featured electoral participation, economic empowerment, and “truth and reconciliation”. It is hard to overstate Mandela’s role in forging this climate and the national unity necessary to complete the most painful labour of the new South African state. Forty years before Mandela became President of the ANC (African National Congress) and then of South Africa, he was founder and then President of their Youth League (ANCYL), a platform he used to revitalize and redirect the ANC itself.

Sixty years later, the current President of the ANCYL is one Julius Malema. He has been described by the current South African President Jacob Zuma as “the future leader of South Africa”, and by others as a demagogue, a reckless populist, a puppet, and puppet master. In any interpretation he is a major figure in the political landscape, and for me he embodies a great many lessons on the shadow side of youth leadership.

Even almost twenty years after Mandela’s release South Africa is a fragile society, whose tender wounds are guarded by layers of social and political of taboo around violence, race, economic disparity and class. Malema’s rhetoric has confronted them all. He has been outspoken on the nationalisation of the mining sector, declaring in Harare that “In SA we are just starting. Here in Zimbabwe you are already very far.” He complained that “minorities” (whites, Coloureds and Indians) ran what he defined as the “economic cluster” in the South African cabinet. He has suggested violent means implicitly and even explicitly as when he stated, “Let us make it clear now: we are prepared to die for (President) Zuma. Not only that, we are prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma.”

Malema is not a man to be cowed easily. Censured by the ANC and directly critiqued by Zuma himself multiple times, he has continued unperturbed. His biographer states, “[Malema] believes that if you criticise him you are either a reactionary or a racist”, and in South Africa this is more than a politically correct riposte (The World according to Julius Malema, Max du Preez, 2010). It is difficult to convey his manner in text, but a short viewing of his April 2010 encounter with a BBC journalist provides an immediate and frightening revelation of character and judgment.

A charismatic, street-wise, young politician, Malema understands his constituency and embodies the confidence and power that a people, who have worryingly little of either, are understandably attracted to. What will result of this leadership, we shall all soon discover.

Observations and lessons drawn

The individual and collective cases, drawn from such different contexts, provide rich examples from the shadow side of youth leadership. I will focus on four key observations that I believe have clear and important application for contemporary youth leaders from all sectors of society.

Lack of critical thinking. As Voltaire put it so powerfully, “those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities”, and indeed it was a lack of critical thinking that allowed the Red Guards actions to transcend their own basic humanity and may allow Malema to transgress on his. In both examples this poverty of reason was created by three forces. First, an attachment to an overly ideological lens in which their political philosophy trumps evidence from reality. Second, a lack of appreciation of their own history, the complexity and depth of the hard fought lessons that challenge such simplistic visions. Third, poor quality education that did not give them the necessary rational skills to see through propaganda and engage in productive political dialogue.

However, this shadow side of leadership should also remind us that there is a positive that casts this shadow. Lack of critical thinking, falls as a shadow from the affinity for new modes of thought that prevails in youth. These new modes recognise that many traditional barriers and conventions are illusionary constrictions that we can overthrow at will. They can recognise valuable innovations and ideals free from the blinding curse of prejudice.

Desire for power and for impact. Malema’s behaviour and rhetoric strongly suggests one most dangerous leadership characteristic—the untempered desire for power and impact. When the true motivation is the reinforcement of one’s ego, a leader will lose sight of the original inequality that inspired their efforts and no consequence of their actions will be enough to break this well fed addiction. Hunger for power results in the belief in the leader’s absolute necessity, and with this belief leader stops serving their people and becomes their master. Furthermore, when change itself becomes the goal, either to validate one’s existence or solely to bring down some established structure, swift destruction can be done to the slow aggregate of the ages.

Desire for power and impact can conceal the positive desire to create a better world—the thirst for greater fulfilment, equity, justice, and beauty that drives much of youthful action. It is a powerful ideal that suggests that the human condition can be better, that the sufferings of the present can be alleviated in the future. Activated by the sense of individual responsibility and empowerment to make this change, young people can be undeniable force for organisational and social transformation.

Manipulation by establishment leaders. The idealism of the Red Guards was clearly manipulated for inter-factional infighting and then they were tossed aside. Similarly, Malema was encouraged to be highly outspoken, and thus influential, in the Zuma’s election and is now starting to become a liability for the establishment. Thus we see that through both empowerment and disempowerment establishment leaders often manipulate the ambitions, philosophy and constituency of youth leaders.

Nonetheless, the positive reciprocation of this deficit is equally true, youth can transform establishment institutions. Just as Mandela utilised the ANCYL as a lever to change the political establishment, youth leaders can bring their undeniable wellspring of energy, ideals and innovation to revitalise and redirect conventional organisations in remarkable ways.

Lack of empathy for those different from oneself. In both cases we see a demonization of “the other”, a view that makes our opponents fundamentally different from ourselves, and thus undeserving of human empathy. This division is nurtured by a number of traits unfortunately common in the thinking of the young; the hasty clarity of a “black and white” perspective, the “other existence” denying view of solipsism or egoism, and the inability to imagine that there are many ways to see, be, and think in this life.

This characteristic is a shadow of the youthful tendency to identify strongly with one’s community. Young people build a large part of their self-image through identifying with peer networks, social communities, and their role models. As these circles of identity expand beyond family, community, religion, and nation state, the welfare of ever expanding segments of humanity becomes important to the individual, and an expanded social consciousness results.

Conclusion

From these very different cases I’ve drawn a picture of youth leadership, which I hope is provocative, relevant to the individual readers own journey, and deeply tied to challenges in the real world. However, I’ve only drawn a few short strands from the rich web of history tied into each of these stories. I encourage the reader to look deeply into these and myriad other examples, to wrestle with the dilemmas confronted in history, and to identify these dilemmas within themselves. For it is inside each of us that the challenge of leadership must first find resolution.

In many ways the individual struggle of young people is reflected in the collective struggle of our young civilisation. Just as they need to cultivate their strengths and wrestle with their shadow sides so too does broader humanity, if it is to avoid the self-inflicted decline of all civilisations past. The only tool we have in this journey is our ability to learn, although it is frighteningly little used. We must find ways to learn the lessons of generations past and present: the history of scholars and the history continually unfolding around us. Similarly we must seek out the lessons of our own leadership as we progress, so that as our youth fades, the light that guides our way only brightens, the call of a world to be changed rings only clearer, and our work in the world falls into only greater harmony with our sense of purpose.

Youth leaders face difficult individual challenges with real world ramifications. These challenges are no lighter for youth than those faced by mature leaders. However, if one masters them in their early years then they may well number among the few who escape the pitfalls of the latter. The global problematic of our time demands no less.

- Originally submitted to “Initiate the Future“, July 10th 2010.

The need for cultural education and an appreciation of diversity are not only challenges of the 20^th century. Competition for resources (land, water, energy, etc) already increases pressure between societies and raises the tensions of real and perceived scarcity to bloody conflict. Conflict all too often justifies the silencing of alternative thought, belief and practice, breeding a dangerous monoculture where ideology can trump reality and incompetence, or worse, atrocity can result.  Despite our 21^st century globalised information, technology and markets, we may thus find ourselves revisiting lessons hard won by generations now passed.

This is not only a challenge in our global problematique, it is one striking at the very heart of the aspiring leader. Cultural education is as much about the discovery of one’s own identity as it is an examination of “the other”. This realisation is critical to developing the self-mastery that lies at the core of the leadership journey. Furthermore, an inclusive mentality that seeks to learn from a diversity of different perspectives is foundational to all growth. One must be willing to challenge their assumptions with the arguments of others if they are going to cultivate a worldview ready to tackle the complex issues that face our common humanity.

Originally submitted for AIESEC International’s 2010 Annual Report as “An  Introduction to Diversity and Cultural Education”.

John Legend Performs from TFA 20th Anniversary Summit on Vimeo.

The twenty-four hour “overseas” journey is the modern hardship of middle-class Australia. We, who have grown soft in our prosperous cities by the seaboard, know little of the difficulties from which famed characteristics of earlier generations grew and that those living in “the other” Australia, of remote and very rural communities, still live with. We are neither so hardy nor so self-reliant, but we have at least a shadow of those great men and women whose nation we now claim. We can drink admirably and often, we can watch a good five full days of cricket without issue, we can shrug off diseases that a European  would take ill from, and make home improvements with a measure of duck tape and WD-40 which would surely cause an American to  seek professional help. We can also walk off a twelve-hour flight and straight onto another just the same without a second thought. This is one of the last remnants of our island heritage.

It is on the second such leg that I now find myself, feeling the strength of my people. It will be my first return to Europe since I left last June, bringing a three and a half years stint in Amsterdam to a close, and ending seven years off island. In the three short weeks on Continent, I shall be visiting fine cities- London, Bucharest, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, Amsterdam- and a finer group of old friends. I will witness weddings and children, career changes and life choices, all of which mark these rare individual who I’m at most privilege to name as friends. I will pull into my organisation’s offices in Berlin and London for a weeks work that I look on with the same eyes as I see my friends, engaging emerging leaders in their fields whose personal and professional passions are delightfully and often necessarily interlinked.

My main ambition is to share authentic experience with these people and places and to make good proof against “the tyranny of distance” that claims so much as the years fall away.  As for places, none of the great cities mentioned gives me a moments pause but fairest Amsterdam. Oh, to imagine walking down the glorious canals, which was my sport, my hobby and my muse over thousands of hours, of afternoons and evenings, as the seasons rolled all around, and within, my self. I imagine strolling thus whilst thinking of a younger Arthur canal-side, and that Arthur envisioning the older in turn reflecting upon the former. Across this veil of time I sense communion in this serene aesthetic of Amsterdam.

The last six months is the longest duration I’ve spent in one country since 2001 and has passed with the speed of a new role in a known land. This trip will be a chance to break from that engagement, to take an account of that which I’ve not allowed myself in my months returned home.  I will pursue a closer examination of the journey that I’ve undertaken in the years since I left, to take some better measure of who now lies behind these eyes, of who it is that returns, of what has been gained and lost, and what quiet space remains ever present.

Two doses of Dioxylamine drowned out three crying babies and their Balkan entourage for me to garner almost ten hours rest on the long haul from Melbourne. Wide eyed with foreknowledge of each of the inevitable steps that would mark this cinematic torment, I queued “The Book of Eli”. Denzel Washington was admirably stoic, in this Ragnorak style defeat of character, actor and audience- all merely playing out our parts, without hope of redemption or release, each blow leading the film closer to wherever it is that such films go to die, and me to dreamless, chemical sleep.

I awoke to a sunrise over a very different part of the world and a concert of crying that unfortunately had not found better harmony despite admirably long hours of practice. I found partial reinvigoration in fruits, a vivid awareness of my lack of progeny, and in the Keats romance, “Bright Star”. Before the conclusion of the narrative, we began descent to Abu Dhabi, so in my imagination Keats is eternally bound between the sufferings of insufferable romance and the creeping “condition” of a pre-Florean pathology. I have no desire to see the remainder, nor for any reconciliation toward unity or deathly division, nor to break the frozen amber dance of Pathos and Thanatos, which says more about Keats than any final falling of life or love.

I transited through the airport and my first taste of the Gulf was an acute awareness of the decided lack of expected decadence. Where is my gold dispensing machine? Where is the retro steam engine whisking me away for an indoor BASE jump, or the Emirati “skill-tester” featuring falconry and Rolexes hidden inside of lesser birds? Perhaps my expectations are based on fantasy and advertising, or perhaps there’s another airport- constructed on a manmade island shaped like JFK (the man not the airport) where the pharaonic desires of the rich in transit are born and met.

The bareness of the gate suggests both a fear that some obviously non-citizen types may take quiet refuge on a bench or other horizontal plane, and that the seat-loving elite are being led elsewhere. I take short solace with a well-travelled Italian coffee brand and some carrot cake that reminds me of playgrounds and being eight.  I open the Economist, which once again predicts the demise of Hugo Chavez, whilst openly mentioning that that the conservatives leading the fine British coalition received less of the popular vote than the demagogue in his land. I take both points as signs of exceptional quality. An electronic board, lacking even a baroque golden frame and semi-precious studding, flashes and I shuffle my goods to the next leg, a casual seven-hour ordeal this time, and then at last the Grande European Summer shall begin.

Since I last blogged, Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize and bombed the moon, built an unbeatable coalition to drive sweeping health-care reform and utterly lost health-care reform, re-regulated Wall Street and stepped in to run Haiti. There can be no excuse- except perhaps my next post explaining the continents, organisations, discoveries, conferences and festivals that lay between then and now, and my deepest commitment to the Internet that I will never abandon it again unless the dice are running unexpectedly hot, in which case I promise to roll the windows down a notch and bring it back a Pepsi.

I will be visiting Colombia enticingly soon. The “Boots’n'all” Number 1 destination for Independent Travellers in 2009 has had a more than difficult tourism brand to work with after a number of violent decades, however this has all changed remarkably in recent years. A new Lonely Planet guide will be released in about ten days, marking open season on a new era of Colombian travel. Here’s an advanced edition of what they have to say on the matter.

“Colombia’s back.

After decades of civil conflict, Colombia is now safe to visit and travelers are discovering what they’ve been missing. The diversity of the country may astonish you. Modern cities with skyscrapers and discos? Check. Gorgeous Caribbean beaches? Check. Jungle walks and Amazon safaris? Check. Colonial cities, archaeological ruins, high-mountain trekking, whale- watching, coffee plantations, scuba diving, surfing, the list goes on.

No wonder the ‘magic realism’ style of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez emerged from here – there is a dreamlike quality to Colombia. Here at the equator, with the sun forever overhead, the fecund earth beneath your feet, heart-stopping vistas in every direction and the warmth of the locals putting you at ease – you may find it difficult to leave.

Although international news reports seldom show it, Colombia is one of the most well-developed countries in Latin America. Universities here produce legions of finely educated, ambitious professionals and the country boasts a reliable legal system with low levels of corruption. World-class health care and hospitals round out its enviable social infrastructure. Its optimistic middle class believes hard work will be rewarded – and it is.

Colombian culture, like the country’s weather, varies by altitude. The essence of Colombia resides in the mountains in the alpine cities of Bogotá, Medellín and Cali, and the smaller cities of the Zona Cafetera. This is the industrial heartland of the country. Geographical isolation has kept the accent relatively unaffected by outside influence; Spanish here is precise and easy to understand. The infrastructure in the mountain region is good, the water drinkable, the roads well maintained. In the heat of the Caribbean coast, life is slower, and the culture more laid-back. The accent is the unhurried drawl of the Caribbean basin, and the infrastructure, unfortunately, is still in need of some attention.

Colombia’s role in the drug trade continues to play out in the back- ground. The improved security situation is due in large part to funding from Washington. This has made little dent in the cocaine business, however, which continues to operate in the deep jungle and the remote mountains. The great richness of Colombia’s tropical soil is both its blessing and its curse – huge varieties of tropical fruit grow here, and Colombia is a major agricultural exporter. It is also the world’s largest producer of cocaine, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.

‘Plan Colombia’ has successfully driven the violence from the cities and the main tourist routes, and brought peace to most of Colombia. While President Álvaro Uribe deserves great credit for this (Colombians call him their first saint), many are deeply worried by the election of US President Barack Obama. Without continued US foreign aid, the widespread fear is that the country will fall back into chaos.

In darker days people used to say, ‘if only it weren’t for the violence and drugs, Colombia would be paradise.’ Well the drugs may still be here but the violence is gone, at least for now, and it is, indeed, paradise. It is an easy country to fall in love with, and many travelers do. It may well become your favorite country in South America.”

© Lonely Planet Publications