Three Models of Education

Historically, three basic types of schooling have existed, roughly divisible into employee, professional, and leadership education.  Because each model has its own goals, each employs very different methods to achieve them.

1. Employee education exists to prepare everyone for a job, any job, by teaching them what to think and how to behave, primarily to function well within employer institutions. It ensures that all rudimentary skills are covered in order to help people assume their labor roles in the workplace and society.
2. Professional education ranges from apprenticeships and trade schools to law, medical and MBA programs. Its purpose is to create specialists by teaching them when to think.
3. Leadership education prepares people for the responsibility of leadership roles within the institutions that shape society. In preparing for such duties there is a particular need to ensure that students know how to think. Examples include judges, leaders in government and businessmen with an interest in magnifying their civic duties.  This is the classical liberal education that has been perpetuated and prized through the ages.

Effective leadership based in correct principles does not occur by accident. It is not a product of luck, birth, or circumstance. It is the product of a replicable and timeless formula. A common pattern throughout history is that great leaders have experienced the core elements of a classical liberal education to prepare them for their life's missions.