"In our first two weeks, you have read two articles, seen several videos and been engaged in several discussions related to the concept of academic leadership. At this point, and in your own words, what does the concept mean to you? What subjects or interests do you have a sophisticated, intellectual understanding of that you may want to turn into a major academic project in this class? How do people sometimes abuse academic knowledge to manipulate others? How would you feel if someone used your work to manipulate others (as Jared Diamond claims Mitt Romney has)? How can creating academically sophisticated, intellectual leaders help prevent such people from taking advantage of others the way they do? How can this create a stronger democratic society?" 

 

Example of girl raised in a democratic society, who had the opportunity of speaking up for herself and the future generations.

Academic Leadership means, from my point of view, developing my leadership skills in order to achieve high standard goals in the future, and not only that, become able to perform the holes of a leader, regardless the environment or situation I'm at. During Academic Leadership, I feel like I am being strongly prepared to face and solve issues not only during my High School life, but also during college and in my future career. The course of Academic Leadership was developed to help students build a relationship of confidence with themselves and the choices that are ahead of them, and also to teach High School students that they will not always be able to rely on a superior, and therefore they must be able to make wise decisions themselves. I strongly believe that having the option of choosing the topic each student would like to work on is also extremely important for building interest among the class. By having the opportunity of choosing a topic, the students will be able to choose a topic that is related to what they want to do for college, what university they want to go to, and even what career they want to follow. 

Since last year I have been doing Model United Nations (MUN) as my elective class, and I will most likely choose subjects related to world politics and issues to transform and develop into a major academic project. I would also like to make a major academic project in topics such as university courses and criterions of choice for students who go to schools like ISC, for example how did past students decided whether they wanted to go to an American university, a Brazilian one or one in Europe.The ignorance among people has been growing considerably in the past years, which means that, in most countries, mostly the ones that are in development process, people do not have access to that much information or knowledge, due to low quality education provided by the government, informations that are manipulated by the midia before being published, and sometimes, the choice of not knowing the real situation itself. Political leaders take advantage of such an ignorance in order to expose their thoughts and the situation in a way that would benefit them. 

Considering that most political leaders are often highly educated, they use that in favor of themselves to make a fool out of the population of their nations.If my work was used in order to manipulate people who are not as educated as I was, I would feel frustrated, because certainly, my work's purpose was to provide knowledge rather than manipulate knowledge. The building of a population academically sophisticated, with strong intellectual leaders would prevent this to happen because as highly educated people, they would not believe in everything that is said, would be able to filter information and to stand up for themselves and for the things they believe in. A democratic society means that everyone has the right of exposing their thoughts about decisions that would influence their lives, which means that a highly educated society, with strong leaders, would give each and everyone of the people in that society the right of speaking up for themselves, their beliefs and their thoughts, which would give them a better quality of life. Highly developed countries, as well as the ones that are not as developed, use the low quality of education and ignorance of their people as a way of manipulating the decisions in favor of the political leaders and the government itself.