Leadership Quote by Abdul Kalam

Kalam isn’t flattering teachers here; he’s issuing a performance review. “Educationists should build” lands like a directive from someone who spent his life inside large, mission-driven institutions where outcomes matter and sentimentality is a luxury. The sentence reads like a blueprint for nation-building: inquiry and creativity supply the innovation engine, entrepreneurship turns ideas into durable systems, and “moral leadership” is the stabilizer meant to keep ambition from curdling into opportunism.

The subtext is a critique of rote instruction without saying so. By foregrounding “spirit of inquiry,” Kalam implies that too much schooling produces compliance, not curiosity. Pairing creativity with entrepreneurship is telling: it’s not enough to imagine; students must be equipped to ship, to persuade, to organize resources in the real world. This reflects the late-20th/early-21st century Indian context he helped symbolize - a country sprinting into a knowledge economy while wrestling with inequality, corruption, and the temptation to treat education as credentialing rather than capability.

Then comes the quiet trapdoor: “become their role model.” Kalam shifts responsibility from curriculum to character. It’s an argument that the hidden syllabus - how adults behave, how they handle power, how they respond to failure - teaches more than lectures do. As a statesman with a scientist’s credibility and a public moral brand, Kalam is also staking a claim: the classroom is where civic culture is manufactured. If educators can’t embody inquiry, ethical courage, and constructive risk-taking, the rhetoric collapses into hypocrisy, and students learn that virtue is just another exam topic.