Serving the Once and Future King: Using the TV Series Merlin to Teach Servant-Leadership and Leadership Ethics in Schools

Abstract

The recent financial crisis has brought business ethics issues to the forefront. While most colleges have formal training in business ethics, a person’s ethical standards have often developed before college age. This application brief proposes using digital popular media to teach servant-leadership principles to public school adolescents. The purpose is to illustrate the advantage of using secular content from the television series Merlin (Wilkie, 2008) to demonstrate an ethics-based leadership perspective through a medium that is accessible to the virtual/video generation.