Why These Bangkok Fifth Graders Reject Celebrity Leadership

Two ten-year-olds at the International Community School of Bangkok wrote leadership essays for a classroom unit that ruled out, by name, the people adults most often hold up as leaders. Elon Musk didn't count, one of them argued, because leadership isn't about being rich or strong. Neither did Joe Biden, because it isn't about holding a title like manager or politician. On episode 87 of the school's student-produced podcast, Students Incorporated, fifth graders Leo and Jimin read essays defining what they called "everyday leadership," and the definition they landed on, independently of each other, had almost nothing to do with power.

The occasion was a classroom leadership unit capped off with a podcast interview: fifth graders Leo and Jimin sat down with Mrs. Donnie, the school's elementary principal, alongside student hosts Mia and Frank, to talk through what leadership means before reading essays they'd each written on the topic. What emerged wasn't a recitation of civics-class talking points. It was two kids arriving, from different angles, at a strikingly consistent theory: that leadership is a set of everyday behaviors (honesty, listening, making hard calls under pressure) available to anyone, and conspicuously not the property of whoever happens to be famous or in charge.

Even the episode's own news segment, delivered by student co-host Mia just before the interview, made a version of the same point without quite meaning to. She profiled three historical rulers as leadership case studies: Napoleon Bonaparte, credited with reforming France's legal system through the Napoleonic Code; Mansa Musa of the Mali Empire, whose wealth was so vast that his gold-giving pilgrimage to Mecca reportedly devalued gold prices in the regions he passed through; and King Taksin the Great, who reunified Siam and founded the Thonburi dynasty after Ayutthaya fell to Burmese forces in 1767. All three were leaders defined by conquest, wealth, or title, precisely the register Leo and Jimin's essays argued against a few minutes later. The show didn't frame it as a setup, but the contrast between the "great man" leaders in the news segment and the "everyday leaders" in the essays that followed was doing real argumentative work, whether the show's writers intended it or not.

Ruling Out the Obvious Answers

Leo's essay did the ruling-out explicitly. An everyday leader, he wrote, "does not have to have a high status like a manager or politician, like someone like Joe Biden," and doesn't need to be "rich or strong like Elon Musk or John Cena," but they "can be an ordinary person." He built his case on a Mother Teresa line about casting "a stone across the water to create many ripples," the idea being that small, repeatable actions compound into real change, which is a different theory of influence than the one built around holding office or a fortune.

Jimin's essay arrived at nearly the same place from a different direction, organizing the idea around three traits: being responsible, being kind and encouraging, and being a strong communicator. She used Dwight D. Eisenhower's line that leadership "consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well," and she wasn't shy about naming a failure mode either, pointing to Adolf Hitler as someone who was, in her framing, "a great communicator, but not good at actually doing what he said." Both essays cited the same John C. Maxwell quote the episode opened with, "a leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way," but built their own arguments outward from it rather than just repeating it.

Neither essay was written in a vacuum. Both students, when asked who they looked up to, gave answers that tracked the same logic: not a public figure, but parents, teachers, friends, and, in Jimin's words, her "inner self," so she could "believe in myself."

What the Principal Was Actually Teaching

Mrs. Donnie's answers, threaded through the interview, explained where that framing likely came from. Asked how leadership education builds confidence in young kids, she made a point of decoupling leadership from personality type: leaders "can be quiet, they can be shy, or bold, or brave, boisterous," she said, and any of those temperaments can show up in "famous leaders throughout history." Resilience, in her account, isn't something taught directly so much as something that accumulates through supervised failure: "leaders learn from their mistakes and the mistakes of others," she said, describing it as the actual mechanism behind the word.

She also connected leadership instruction to problem-solving, describing it as something the school scaffolds starting in pre-kindergarten, with teachers shifting from giving answers to acting "more like coaches" as students get older, helping them sort out whether a problem is what she called "a kid-size problem or an adult-size problem." And she was direct about where authority actually comes from: "a real leader cannot force people to follow them," she said. They can use fear or prizes to get compliance, but a leader who actually earns followers does it by listening and by making decisions that serve more than just themselves.

An Old Idea, Newly Popular Again

The framing Leo and Jimin landed on, that leadership is a set of ordinary, learnable behaviors rather than a status conferred by office, wealth, or fame, isn't unique to one classroom in Bangkok. It's close enough to a recognized strand of K-12 character education that it shares a name with an actual curriculum: "Building Everyday Leadership in All Kids," a widely used elementary program built on the premise, stated almost identically to Leo's essay, that anyone can lead and it's never too early to start. Whether or not ICS Bangkok draws on that specific material, the overlap says something about how common this reframing has become in elementary education generally.

It's also happening at meaningful scale. FranklinCovey's "Leader in Me" program, built on a similar premise that every student in a school can practice leadership regardless of role, has been adopted by more than 1,100 elementary schools in over 20 countries, training close to 550,000 students and nearly 50,000 staff, according to the company's own figures. That's not a fringe pedagogical experiment; it's evidence that "leadership for everyone, not leadership for the person in charge" has become a mainstream design principle in elementary education over the past decade.

There's research behind the push, too. A landmark 2011 meta-analysis in the journal Child Development, covering 213 school-based social-emotional learning programs and more than 270,000 K-12 students, found that participants scored roughly 11 percentile points higher academically than peers who didn't get the training, alongside measurable gains in behavior and attitudes: the same cluster of skills, responsibility, empathy, communication, that Mrs. Donnie described building through leadership instruction. A more recent synthesis, published in 2025 covering elementary and middle schoolers specifically, found smaller but still positive effects on achievement, suggesting the benefit is real even if its size varies by program and grade band.

Why the Distinction Might Matter More Now

The world is most likely running out of good leaders and we need them.

That line, from Leo's essay, lands differently against recent survey data on how his generation's older siblings actually feel about the adults currently in charge. A fall 2025 survey reported by City & State Pennsylvania found that just 2.1% of Gen Z students statewide believed elected officials made decisions with young people's interests in mind. Separately, a 2026 analysis from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University found young Americans expressing markedly weaker trust in democratic institutions and political parties than older generations, with a majority saying the system needs structural change regardless of who wins the next election.

None of that data reached the fifth grade classroom at ICS Bangkok, and Leo and Jimin weren't citing polls. But the instinct they arrived at independently, that the people with the most visible power aren't necessarily the ones worth modeling, echoes a skepticism that's showing up in hard numbers just a few years further down the age ladder. If elementary schools are increasingly teaching kids that leadership is something you do, not a position you're granted, it may be less a coincidence than a response: an attempt to hand the next generation a working definition of leadership before the adult world's version of it has a chance to disappoint them.

Frank closed the segment with a wry aside during the news portion of the same episode, noting that "some of them," the leaders currently running things, "aren't doing so well." It got a laugh in the studio. Leo and Jimin's essays suggest it wasn't only a joke.

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