Globally good educational leaders: a contribution to a new discourse on educational leadership

Today's humanity finds itself in a socio-historically unprecedented predicament referred to as globalization. Every aspect of human activity, including educational leadership, has to face this dynamic of opportunities and dangers. The nature of the response of educational leadership to globalization can be adaptive, reactive or transformative. The currently prevalent perspective on public education views educational leadership as a managerial function, securing the most efficient output of an educational assembly line. Bypassing the most essential questions pertaining to its purpose and basic rationale, this approach degrades educational leadership to a mere instrumentality in service to the mechanisms of market economy. This paper will present an alternative approach, arguing for the necessity of a transformative leadership response one that is predicated on the idea of schools acting as spearheads of glocal societal transformation, primarily based on Reconstructionist educational philosophy. The paper will, then, move on to construct the concept, and identify the salient features, of the globally good educational leader: a leadership role that has the wellbeing of the entire global society as its starting point, and that would be accepted as desirable by rationally thinking people in any cultural setting.