The Place of War in Classical Education
In 1958, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, a piece of legislation intended primarily to improve schooling in math, science, and engineering for American students. The act included grants to school districts for math and science programs, along with loans and scholarships that would allow promising students in math, science, and engineering to continue their studies at the university level. The act was passed in the wake of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, which rattled the American public out of their complacent assumption of their country’s technological superiority. The NDEA was one of the earliest examples of federal funding directed towards education; it was previously held by most Americans that the responsibility for educating students lay with local governments. The consternation resulting from the launch of Sputnik, however, pushed these reservations to the side, and opened the door to the sort of massive federal interventions in American schooling that we now take for granted.
What is notable is that these interventions received their initial impetus from a felt need to better prepare the American people for military conflict. The prioritization of STEM fields in the nation’s curriculum resulted from a drive to match the military capacities of our adversaries. Since 1958, the extent of the federal government’s interventions in America’s schoolrooms has expanded greatly, and that expansion has been marked to the present day by an unmistakable preoccupation among public officials with the state of STEM instruction. It will be a momentous occasion when we hear a politician lament the decline in writing ability among American students – though it is considerable – or about their lack of acquaintance with our musical, artistic, and architectural heritage – though it is nearly complete. Yet we hear them all the time lament the comparative weakness in our students’ performance when it comes to STEM disciplines. It is hard to escape the feeling that at least some portion of this continuing preoccupation with STEM among our leaders testifies – now as at the first – to their concern with maintaining our country’s military preeminence.
I imagine that more than one reader is here expecting me to denounce the influence of military concerns over the instruction that our children receive in the classroom, and to launch into a rant about the evils of the “war state” and things like that, and yes, there is a part of me that wants to deliver just such a rant. But if we are being candid, we will have to admit that some concern with forging young men who are capable of undertaking the defense of their country has been a prime objective of formal schooling since ancient times. A classical educator should be the last person in the world to dismiss the inclusion of military readiness among the aims pursued by a country’s educational apparatus, since nearly every source upon which we rest our pedagogy explicitly appeals to such an end.
Socrates, in describing the educational program he envisions providing to the guardians of his fabled Republic, includes the physical exercises involved in “gymnastic” as the means to prepare the bodies of these select young men for the exertions of the campaign and battlefield. He ascribes a further use to the tangible rigors of gymnastic, however, in balancing the effeminizing tendencies of purely intellectual study (this need to prevent study from degenerating into softness is a common theme in the writings of classical educators). From this proper harmony of body and soul emerges the thumos which Socrates believes characteristic of the well-bred guardian:
“Do you think,” said I, “that there is any difference between the nature of a well-bred hound for this watch-dog's work and of a well-born lad?” “What point have you in mind?” “I mean that each of them must be keen of perception, quick in pursuit of what it has apprehended, and strong too if it has to fight it out with its captive.” “Why, yes,” said he, “there is need of all these qualities.” “And it must, further, be brave if it is to fight well.” “Of course.” “And will a creature be ready to be brave that is not high-spirited, whether horse or dog or anything else? Have you never observed what an irresistible and invincible thing is spirit, the presence of which makes every soul in the face of everything fearless and unconquerable?” “I have.” “The physical qualities of the guardian, then, are obvious.” “Yes.” “And also those of his soul, namely that he must be of high spirit.”
Aristotle seems to accept this view of physical education as conducive to both military readiness and personal virtue, though he warns several times about the dangers of an over-emphasis on this aspect of a child’s rearing. In his Politics, he discusses the sorts of childrearing practices that inculcate “the military habit” – practices such as exposing them to the cold early and feeding them on “the food which has most milk in it.” Again, the idea here is that in preparing their bodies for war, the educator is instilling virtues of fortitude and endurance in the children under his tutelage. Aristotle thinks this training renders young men “useful to the art of statesmanship,” though he worries that an undue obsession with military imperatives – and the excessive physical training that results from this obsession – will cause the educator to neglect the other talents entailed in the art of statesmanship, which are intellectual and exerted in a state of peace.
When the revival of classical learning occurred during the Renaissance, this appreciation for the martial element in schooling, along with the assumption that the physical exertion entailed in this training was conducive to the development of virtues like courage and persistence, continued to influence the opinions of educational theorists. Milton, for instance, wrote: “I call therefore a compleat and generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publick of Peace and War.” He explicitly linked the military element in his scheme of education to the cultivation of virtue: “The Exercise which I commend first, is the exact use of their Weapon, to guard and to strike safely with edge, or point; this will keep them healthy, nimble, strong, and well in breath, is also the likeliest means to make them grow large and tall, and to inspire them with a gallant and fearless courage, which being temper'd with seasonable Lectures and Precepts to them of true Fortitude and Patience, will turn into a native and heroick valour, and make them hate the cowardise of doing wrong.”
Before him, the Italian humanist Peter Paul Vergerius prescribed a thoroughgoing military training for students: “our youth must learn the art of the sword, the cut, the thrust, and the parry, the use of the shield; of the spear; of the club; training either hand to wield the weapon. Further, swimming…running, jumping, wrestling, boxing, javelin-throwing, archery, thorough horsemanship…these are all needful to the full training of a soldier.” By engaging regularly in these martial practices, young men would become “exercised in activity and courage by feats of strength or dangers in the field;” the physical strength resulting from such practices lends itself to virtue, since it is “accompanied by a contempt of death, and by a consequent invincible courage.” Vergerius even includes rudimentary training in generalship (“the skill of Embattelling, Marching, Encamping, Fortifying, Besieging and Battering, with all the helps of ancient and modern stratagems, tactics and warlike maxims”) in his educational program, since the capacity for leadership instilled by this training also bestows a “knowledge that belongs to good men or good governors.”
An evident consensus can be discerned among these thinkers, and within the tradition of classical education they represent. One of the ends which the schoolmaster must have in mind is the training and preparation of young persons capable of undertaking the defense of their nation. This purpose was regarded as perfectly consonant with the general endeavor to inculcate virtue in pupils, since the physical exercises involved in military training were ones that tended to nurture traits like courage, fortitude, and leadership. Pupils studied the feats of Aeneas and Odysseus in their classroom, and then went out to the fields to emulate the hardihood of those feats. The training of the capacity for reflection enhanced the capacity for action, and the training of the capacity for action deepened the effect of the training of the capacity for reflection.
So one prime assumption lying behind the NDEA – the assumption that one overarching purpose of an educational program is to prepare young people for the defense of their country – is in fact as common and venerable a principle as there is in the history of Western educational theory. What has obviously changed – and changed drastically – is the nature of war itself. To be sure, the sheer physical prowess of the soldier, with its attendant virtues of courage and fortitude, remains as crucial on the battlefields of our day as it did in the past. Anyone familiar with the almost mythical feats of our special forces soldiers, and the legendary training regimens these men endure in preparation for the battlefield, will readily acknowledge that the kind of martial pedagogy prescribed by Plato and Milton remains as valuable an element in our national security as ever.
It is undeniable, however, that the vastly increased potency of military technology completely changes the relationship between a nation’s defense readiness and the educational program it prescribes for its children. In the days of the phalanx and the cavalry, ensuring that your nation could field an effective military meant ensuring that her young men possessed the physical strength to fight in largely hand-to-hand combat, and the physical courage to endure this form of combat. In the days of drone and aircraft carrier, the deployment of an effective military relies to a far greater extent on forms of technical knowledge and economic robustness. Eggheads toiling away in the corridors of Raytheon now play as decisive a role in the outcomes of the battlefield as the hulking heroes bearing their inventions to the frontlines.
What this means is that promoting the teaching of STEM disciplines – as was the intention of the NDEA – must to a large extent supplant the older, more physical, military training that classical educators once espoused. And what this means is that there is no longer that consonance that obtained in the old schools between the imperative to produce young people capable of defending their nation and the cultivation of virtue in those same young people. Aristotle and Vergerius could assume that the physical exertions they demanded of their imagined students would engender courage and statesmanship. Working out the calculations that make a rocket fly an extra hundred miles does not engender courage and statesmanship. No thumos is won from the study of Physics; no arete involved in a command of Economics. I will not deny that there may be other virtues involved in the study of these disciplines – a mental diligence, let’s say. But the connection between the acquisition of technical knowledge and the acquisition of virtue is far more tenuous and arbitrary than that between the military training of the old classical educators and the courage and hardihood they aimed to inculcate. The forms of schooling that lend themselves to military success in the modern world simply do not coincide with the forms of schooling that result in individual virtue.
This presents an enormous challenge to modern day classical educators. It is not sufficient to decry the preponderance of the military-industrial complex, and to insist our schools remain untainted by the imperatives of national defense. A denial that education has anything to do with preparation for military readiness is the most un-classical position in the world. Nonetheless, the challenges of harmonizing this imperative to the larger pedagogical end of cultivating virtue are far greater for modern educators than they were for our predecessors.
It is worthwhile meditating seriously on these challenges. After all, this dilemma is only a subset of the larger dilemma faced by modern classical educators: how to match the venerable tradition of Western pedagogy to the complexities of the modern world. Over time, the success of the classical schooling movement will depend in large part on the ability of its proponents to appropriate the wisdom of the classical tradition in a way that meets the needs of our complicated present.