Living On Your Radio

For those of us who love it, country music frequently nails life’s mysteries with just the right parable. Toby Keith, in “How do you like me now?” spins the tale of a man and a women looking back at their formative high school years. How they developed their own world view influenced the outcome of their adult lives. She epitomized what official schooldom held dear: well behaved, popular, and a model student, even graduating valedictorian. Keith’s video even portrays her as the friend-sheltered cheerleader, a southern image of respectability and glamour. The boy on the other hand lives by different rules. From her point of view, he is not only socially awkward (totally uncool) but he publicly humiliates her by writing her name on the most sacred of Southern icons, the football field, as if it were no better than the smudged wall behind the payphone in some dive. He makes lousy decisions, at least according to his would-be girl friend, and we suspect the school’s administration.

I was always the crazy one
I broke into the stadium
And I wrote your number on the 50 yard line
You were always the perfect one
And the valedictorian so
Under your number I wrote "call for a good time"

Just a bit piqued, she never made the call. Instead she plays out her own story, lives by the rules of the kingdom, and wins the prince. All ends happily ever after? Except that it doesn’t.

Then you married into money girl
Ain't it a cruel and funny world?
He took your dreams and tore them apart.

Only a poet can say so much in so few words.

The boy frames his life story much differently. He follows his music straight to Nashville, perhaps even to the Grand Ole Opry, the most acclaimed venue in all of country music except for one, the radio were songs are played over and over again. He succeeds. He leads the music charts.

When I took off to Tennessee
I heard that you made fun of me
Never imagined I'd make it this far

And later…

He never comes home
And you’re always alone
And your kids hear you cryin down the hall
Alarm clock starts ringin
Who could that be singin
It's me baby, with your wake up call!

Could her teachers have predicted this outcome? Whereas the princess gained a pampered but lonely kingdom; the outcast gained fame. His story runs counter to accepted wisdom. Perhaps accepted wisdom is wrong – or perhaps leadership development has its own wisdom. Do leaders have to act differently? If so, is it because they develop differently? Toby Keith’s song suggests, as does country music as a whole, that the high school years present conflicting sets of values. Certainly country music lauds the hero/ heroine image, but it also gets great play out of the attraction of bad boys (and bad girls). Here, however, the boy seems neither the honored student council president, nor the testosterone hyped, truck driving, football quarterback. He loves his music; it provides meaning and focus and, ultimately, fame. Country music also traditionally applauds young people who follow their vision, the dreams that sing in their heads. With his guitar slung across his shoulder, he makes it to Tennessee and then on to her radio. Note his dig; she may have silenced his voice but not his singing, the first thing she hears each morning.

(Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOkhqxaKqVs )

Should the elite intellectuals snob-down this genre as a true well of human commentary, I suggest they re-read their Shakespeare: Hal, the rapscallion youth, went on as Henry IV to rescue England from the Hundred Years War, thanks in great part to his adolescent bar-and-brothel wisdom. Both Romeo and Juliet played out their adolescent acquired roles to the sadness of their families. An even worse sadness plagued Hamlet, who never moved out of adolescence.

Science, relying on more than anecdote and parable (despite my own special thanks to Toby Keith) reached the same conclusions through the field of neurobiology, brain research. Thanks to the MRI and other non invasive techniques, scientists, who can now watch brains evolve, note that the brain changes over time. Prior to adolescence, most of the brain had fully formed, but here’s the kicker, except for the prefrontal cortex. This portion of the brain, its frontal lobe, controls learning and socialization. The maturing of the prefrontal cortex determines how adults organize plans and ideas, form strategies, control impulses, and allocate attention. These sound mighty necessary for leaders. By the time individuals has reached their late twenties, their brains have finished maturing. This most important tool has fully formed well before the period of time studied by modern researchers. His adolescent years did more than begin Lincoln’s biography, they shaped the outcome. Great events rest on how we educators help prospective leaders shape their stories.

Amazon.com lists 321,535 titles containing the key word “leadership.” Most of these books fall into two categories: studies of leadership patterns among adults; and self-help adult leadership books (teens tend to scorn self-help books.) When I narrowed my Amazon search to “adolescent leadership” or “teen leadership,” the combined number of books represented only one fifth of one percent of all the books listed in this field. If these books were stacked side to side down the center line of a high school track, with all the adolescent/teen leadership books arranged first, a runner would not even get back to the starting line before the books ran out. On the other hand the she would be lapped 240 times by the runner dedicated to completing the full collection. The field of leadership development grows each year, but, unfortunately, almost all of this is wasted on adult centered research, having little deep affect on how leaders act.

Those who end up “Living in your radio,” on the cover of Time magazine, or sitting in Congress did so because of the basic habits of mind that were cemented in place during high school. Can we determine even general leadership predictors? Can we throw away the self-help books and provide assistance where it really can do some good?

I argue that researchers need to shift their focus to where leadership forms; to paraphrase another parable (Luke 8:4-15) it is not the nature of the seed, nor what the mature plant looks like no matter how many followers nest among its branches; but rather how and where it is planted. Hamlet got trampled; Juliet choked among the thorns, Henry grew and brought forth the fruit of the Tudors. As an educator, I want to know how and what truly makes the difference: I have the seed how do I help it grow into the greatness it can become.

Never again will he or she be an adolescent!