Leadership training courses alienate selected leaders from their own communities

Evidence

These courses are based on the naïve assumption that one can promote the community by training its leaders—as if it were the parts that promote the whole and not the whole which, in being promoted, promotes the parts. Those members of the communities who show sufficient leadership capacities to be chosen for these courses necessarily reflect and express the aspirations of the individuals of their community. They are in harmony with the way of living and thinking about reality which characterizes their comrades, even though they reveal special abilities which give them the status of “leaders.” As soon as they complete the course and return to the community with resources they did not formerly possess, they either use these resources to control the submerged and dominated consciousness of their comrades, or they become strangers in their own communities and their former leadership position is thus threatened. — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 458

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: This is a precise, concrete instance of a facilitator ‘already knowing the correct consciousness’ — the reader’s stated critique of Freire. The trained leader returns with outside resources and manipulates, exactly the vanguard failure mode.
• XREF: Connects to the reading purpose’s contestation of Freire’s method risking a new vanguard; the leadership-course mechanism names concretely why training parts rather than the whole backfires.