Joseph Ellis and Robert Moore. School for Soldiers: West Point and the Profession of Arms. OUP, 1974.

School for Soldiers: West Point and the Profession of Arms examines the people, institutions, and customs of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the nation's legendary resource for educating potential Army officers. The authors of the study are Joseph J. Ellis*, a successful historian of the American revolution, and Robert Moore, an American literature specialist with a particular emphasis on William Faulkner. Ellis and Moore researched their book when they were both young army officers assigned to short teaching stints at West Point. School for Soldiers was published in 1974, the same year that General David Petraeus graduated from the academy, and so provides a close examination of a particularly important generation of soldiers. The soldiers who graduated in 1974 were too young to serve in Vietnam, thrived in the unrestrained military spending of the Reagan years, survived the cuts of the Clinton years, and then (if they were not already retired) led American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. West Point cadets serve as the backbone of the officer corps; they are the dependable individuals who desire to make at least a partial career out of soldiering. Back in 1974, Ellis and Moore took the time to investigate what exactly these officers were learning in college and, using anonymous interviews with instructors and cadets, what they thought about it.

Most (if not all) military academies, including West Point, exhibit the same basic attributes. The students operate within a regimented, military-like organization, with carefully regulated hours. Much time is spent developing attributes that will prove useful to a military officer, like physical fitness and attention to detail. The cadets, to some extent, police themselves. The freshmen (or plebes) follow the sophomores, who follow the juniors, who follow the seniors, who take guidance from tactical instructors and the official organizational heads of West Point. Student grades are public knowledge, and each cadet knows how he is faring compared with his peers. At the time of Ellis and Moore's book, the academy did not admit women; an act of Congress changed  this policy in 1975. Cadets follow a straightforward path to graduation, with little room for electives or experimentation or clubs. The unrelenting emphasis is on graduating individuals who will prove useful officers to the United States Army. The academy's basic methods comes from the 'Thayer' system, a comprehensive military and educational tradition established by Sylvanus Thayer, a "cold, severe graduate of Dartmouth (1807) and West Point (1808) whose personal correspondence reads like a set of battle orders." Thayer led West Point from 1817 to 1833, and his main goal was to make West Point a prominent national institution. He succeeded absolutely. West Point became "an institution that knew what it was about, a place where a young American was remade in the image of Thayer himself." At first the academy churned out the young nation's premier corps of engineers; but since before the Civil War the emphasis has been on creating career military officers with only a secondary emphasis on the complexities of modern engineering, social science, or liberal arts methods. The military minds that come out of West Point retain the Thayer confidence, and the Thayer spirit.

The authors make much out of the "distinctiveness" of West Point's indoctrination methods. The school includes a two-month 'basic training' process for all incoming freshmen. Mid-career Army officers teach most of the classes, and they arrive at West Point fresh off of earning a Master's degree in a one or two-year period. Administrators, rather than looking for able educators, tend to recruit officers that seem likely to succeed in West Point's closely monitored conditions, and who themselves performed well as cadets. The authors, who themselves taught at West Point as young Army officers, found the 'Thayer system' stifling and odd; the resultant education (in their view) could not compete with elite educational opportunities offered at Harvard, or the best public universities. The cadets spent too much time conducting mind-numbing training exercises, obeying rote instructions, and scraping through their coursework, and not enough time in serious study. But by placing the socialization of West Point cadets in closer comparison to institutions elsewhere, the authors would have been forced to admit that much of higher education is, regardless of the institution, unfortunately (unavoidably) devoted to socialization and indoctrination, a point hit upon two years later in a famous book by sociologists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. An emphasis on discipline and unthinking obedience does not set West Point cadets apart--these types can be found anywhere, even the most prestigious liberal arts schools (see David Mamet's play Oleanna).

A liberal education costs so much time and money for the teacher, student, and community (and places traditional values at such risk) that it almost never occurs. A liberal education requires the participation of nearly every part of society, including family, friends, and government. The sort of person who goes to West Point for an education is, in part, looking for a place in an unusually stable social system, one with traditions that stretch back for two-hundred years. People attend West Point for reasons similar to why they "waste time" in fraternities, or athletics, or any other club: most people enjoy competing for status rewards and developing social networks in which those rewards hold stable value. Ellis and Moore's critique of West Point's 'negative' attributes lacks teeth when considered from a wider perspective.

The deeper point that they approach, however, is that the stakes are much higher for a West Point graduate than for a typical young American. The key attribute of a West Point graduate is deference to authority; this proves successful when the country pursues a unified foreign policy, but looks foolish or absurd during controversial moments, such as during the war in Vietnam. The authors believe the academy leaves West Point graduates with a capacity for ceaseless hard work, superb staff skills, excellent bureaucratic gamesmanship, and a necessarily useful ability to ingratiate themselves with key superiors. So West Point cadets will succeed in one way or another--the question is: What exactly are they succeeding at? And does a cadet's preparation at West Point help secure the country and satisfy the needs of the Constitution? West Pointers are particularly good at appearing on top of the problem, "But the difficulty for a military man is that, having mastered the ability of appearing to be on top of the problem, he is very reluctant to set his legerdemain skills aside and admit he doesn't understand the problem." This difficulty might be funny when examining the blustering of a newly hired advertising agent. But it is potentially tragic when officers lead soldiers into combat.

Ultimately, the exceptional nature of West Point is not that its education resembles mere training and socialization; what sets West Point apart is that its students, upon graduation, may immediately be placed in circumstances in which education would prove useful. A merely decent military career can be had with strict socialization and group discipline, but a truly great one requires liberal education and personal discipline. This argument has a moral quality to it, and it does not actually appear in Morris and Ellis' book. They skirt the issue, and rely on the reader's familiarity with the Vietnam war to provide the obvious context for the problem. This may be just as well. The authors seem aware that the problems they describe in the book lack any coherent answer given the social and political forces that buffet West Point from Washington DC, the United States Army, and West Point's influential alumni network.

School for Soldiers ultimately provides a useful, if overheated account of West Point in the 1970s. Ellis and Moore offer interesting insights into the lives of cadets and instructors at West Point, and sketch the inherent tensions between military life and academic pursuits. The book's heavy-handed critiques limit its value as a work that explores the nature of education in military settings. Their argument contrasts the lives of West Point cadets to the ideals of reputedly top flight academic institutions, a comparison of fruit versus trees. A fuller critique would require two steps. First, a comparative analysis of West Point cadets with undergraduates from other universities. Second, a historical consideration of those individuals who fit Ellis and Moore's vision of a 'proper' Army officer would help determine what exactly a West Point education should strive to provide. Despite these structural flaws, School for Soldiers ably introduces the basics of life at a cloistered military academy, and it does so with an engaging, thoughtful voice.


*Late in his career, Ellis received an academic suspension for fabricating major aspects of his own brief military career. He told students--and talk show hosts--that he served in Vietnam, and that this experience informed his study of our country's founders. He never served in Vietnam. West Point values integrity above almost every other attribute, so it is unfortunate but necessary to point out the tension between Ellis' achievement in School for Soldiers, and his own difficulty in satisfying the demands of the institution. 

Here is a lousy quote from the opening scene in Gone with the Wind:

There is a tendency in the state of Texas, and in southern literature, to imagine and fantasize about the 'Old South' as the last gasp of feudalism, feudal honor, feudal obligation, and its accompanying virtues and vices. This tendency credits the Old South with retaining special vestiges of nobility, and a connection between the earth and the people on it.

Let's try to clarify when and where feudalism existed. It was a form of politics, or social organization, that predominated in some parts of Europe, especially England, during the medieval period. It began falling to pieces in the Early Modern period, beginning with the Tudor monarchy; that is to say , it began falling apart under Henry VII. Henry VII's successor, Henry VIII, used parliamentary process to destroy the feudal lords that put his ancestors on the throne in 1066; the destruction culminated in the English Civil War, which diminished not only the feudal lords, but the monarchy as well. 

During this same time period in Early Modern England, feudal lords began severing their relationships with their serfs and vassals; the lords sought to shift away from subsistence farming so as to enter the English wool industry and conduct lucrative trade with Europe. The movement to kick the serfs off the manor and to introduce shepherding was known as the 'enclosure' movement. While it temporarily solved some debt and financial problems for the English nobility, it ultimately created a wealthy merchant class that could maximize its own benefits from European trade. Henry VII and his successors saw the new professional bourgeoisie class as a source of power that would allow them to confront their dangerous nobles. 

So the feudal system in England began collapsing in the mid 16th century, just prior to the establishment of the first English colonies in America. 

Let's look at the South. Remember, Southern legends often associate the Old South with the feudalism of Old England.

Two facts about the Southern economy undermine the notion that it was a feudal system:

First, the dominant economic activity of the south was capitalist, and it came in two forms. First, cotton dominated the economic landscape. Cotton tended to exhaust the soil, and required the opening of new lands to continue its growth. Most of this cotton was sold to Great Britain, where it was processed into cloth. Southern planters sold the remainder to northern industrial states like New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

The original southern lands--those that rested along the Atlantic, like the Carolinas and Georgia, were exhausted after generations of growing tobacco and cotton. So these states, especially after the banning of the international slave trade in 1808, specialized in breeding and exporting slaves to cotton plantations opening in Texas and in the territory belonging to the Louisiana purchase.

Now--what do these two facts tell us? Well, first, they bear no serious relationship to feudalism. In feudalism, both lord and peasant were stuck to the land, and as the land went, so they went. Land ownership was primarily a status symbol and a useful political lever; lords and peasant were judged on their ability to maintain a calm sense of order and habit despite raids, violence, and encroaching rivals. Though lands changed hands, this was viewed as ignoble, and lesser than maintaining custom and holding on to what one already had.

In the Southern United States, on the other hand, Westward expansion allowed the depletion and shuffling off of old soil, and old obligations for new frontiers in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

The South was not feudal in character. Though feudalism, and more specifically, classical notions of liberty, served as a productive intellectual scaffolding for the processes that occurred on any given plantation. So did traditional morality as found in the Bible. Southerners also used a sort 'scientism' to argue for the 'naturalness' of slavery due to the perceived inferiority of people of African descent. Through Southern society looked conservative and later, after the war, became conservative, it was in fact fairly radical form of agricultural capitalism. No one had ever quite used up soil and labor the way the South did in the years leading up to the civil war. Never before had there been such a worldwide demand for cotton, which we must remember is an inedible agricultural product. Southern planters used the land to grow a product that held no nutritional value. They relied on international trade to maintain their lifestyles, and to help feed their families, their workers, and their slaves. There was nothing feudal about it. The planters were bourgeois, callous, and rich.

By some accounts, when one assesses capital in the United States in 1860, slaves accounted for more wealth than all the railroads and all the manufacturing combined. Southern states viewed the Republicans as a dual threat, both to their wealth and their way of life. Republican candidates, including Abraham Lincoln, did not even appear on state ballots in many Southern states. When Lincoln won 180 electoral votes, and virtually all of the northern states, he only obtained a plurality of the popular vote, and not a majority. Southern states were shocked and outraged, though they had astutely avoided any displays of outrage when the mere plurality favored the South in 1844, 1848, and 1856 presidential elections. 

Now, I do not mean to denigrate the south simply to raise up the northern states as a collection of model states. States both north and south refused women the right to vote. Northern states treated untrained immigrant labor as expendable. Since northern manufacturing could not compete with European manufacturing, the northern industrialists demanded tariff protections to allow them to capture the supply chain to Midwest farmers and Southern planters. 

But as Barrington Moore points out in his classic treatise, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), the North did see a short-lived union between the interests of Northern industrialists and small farmers. What allowed this alliance? In part, it was the rapid formation of the Republican party, and the party's desperate attempt to pull together disparate elements of society to win elections that would swing the balance of power towards the creation of government-sponsored infrastructures like better roads, new cut canals, and continental railroads. 

The broader Republican campaign in 1860 made the alliance between small farmers and northern industrialists quite clear: "Vote yourself a farm--vote yourself a tariff."

Tariffs and hard scrabble farms along the Ohio River are not especially romantic. But they are a superior part of the American memory to the disturbing nostalgia of some Americans for a feudal Southern society that never existed. 

Wavell, Archibald. Allenby: A Study in Greatness, George G. Harrap & Co. (Vol. 1 1940; Vol. II 1943.)

 The life of Edmund Allenby, a soldier and a statesman, in many ways anticipated the trials of his first biographer, Archibald Wavell. Born of "old-rooted English stock," Allenby grew into a tall, barrel-chested young cavalry officer. He served among the first generation of officers in which attendance at Staff College, rather than purchase, ensured promotion. He loved literature, the outdoors, and hunting; his letters to his wife rarely depict warfare, but often mention nature. Allenby's first  experience in a contest of arms occurred during the Boer War of 1899-1902. He served ably, but more importantly he developed connections with the soldiers who later became the key officers of the First World War. Such connections helped ensure his promotion through the ranks. When the Great War began he immediately assumed command of a division of cavalry as a major-general. But the weight of command transformed his personality, so that an "easy-going young officer and a good-humoured squadron leader [became] a strict colonel, an irascible brigadier, and an explosive general." Out of fear and resentment, his men coined him "The Bull." The early years of the First World War cemented his reputation, as thousands of men died under Allenby's command as he bluntly executed orders from above. The year 1917 proved particularly fateful. Allenby began the year with serious losses at the Battle of Arrass, removal from the Western front, and the loss of his only son to German artillery shells; Allenby ended the year in the Middle East with the conquest of Jerusalem. The next year, he conquered Damascus. Given fresh resources and a weakened enemy, Allenby commanded one of the most decisive and efficient campaigns in the history of modern warfare as he swept up the Mediterranean coast and destroyed the Ottoman Empire. His relentless energy provided the Egyptian Expeditionary Force with the necessary momentum to decisively defeat the enemy.

 T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom gives a far more heroic portrait of Allenby than Wavell does here; in fact, Wavell goes to great lengths to temper Lawrence's praise with a sober assessment of Allenby's flaws: his zeal for rules, loyalty, and unquestioned service. Wavell writes with praise, and yet a subtle sense of irony creeps into the biography, as though Wavell no longer believes in greatness. While it lacks the humor of some of Wavell's other works, the book sustains interest as a surprisingly impersonal reflection on Wavell's views of military and civilian leadership.

Archibald Wavell (Field Marshal, Viscount, and Viceroy of India) published his two volume biography of Field Marshall Edmund Allenby in the midst of his own challenges. Wavell served under Allenby in the First World War as a liaison and a staff officer with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. As Wavell finished the first volume of the biography, he served as Commander in Chief in the Middle East, a status similar to the command Allenby once held. As Wavell finished the second volume, he held the Viceroyalty of India, a status somewhat greater than Allenby's eventual post of High Commissioner of Egypt and the Sudan.

Ever since Basil Liddel Hart's glowing statements on T.E. Lawrence strategic genius, Lawrence's reputation has centered on his military accomplishments, rather than his achievements in art. This is a mistake. 

Orde Wingate despised Lawrence's record as a war-leader, possibly because Wingate recognized something of his own failings in Lawrence. But Wingate also felt that Lawrence abdicated his personal responsibilities as an officer to play too much the desert warrior. There are no records of Wingate actually shooting an enemy in combat--he was too busy maintaining his supply line and keeping his troops on the march. Lawrence fired his weapon often, and preferred the emotional rush of battle to the more mundane tasks typically required of officers in combat. Lawrence's emphasis on action, in Wingate's view, was an abdication of responsibility. 

Lawrence's campaigns are often held up as a positive example of irregular warfare, and as a better way of fighting than what soldiers faced in the trenches of the First World War. Lawrence himself was not so sure that he was actually preserving life, or winning battles more efficiently. The numbers, in fact, indicate that he lost men at a higher rate than most British units that faced action on the Western front. This is not surprising. State control and industrial efficiency seems to reduce  casualties, either because men lose their willingness to die as a mere part of a 'machine' rather than as an individual warrior, or else because industrial society provides soldiers with better access to medicine and stable rations. State control also increases the number of prisoners taken, and reduces the number of prisoners slaughtered. 

British methods of warfare and 'state control' might outright reduce the 'proportion' of people who die violently. Lawrence noticed this, which explains why he heaps praise upon Allenby above and beyond any other soldier in the First World War, and why he denigrates Allenby's rival commanders not as butchers, but as unimaginative sticks-in-the-mud. 

So why does Lawrence seem attracted to desert warfare? His writings indicate that he appreciated the straightforward human practicality of 'desert' warfare. Yes, the violence in the desert was terrible, but it was coupled with a familiarity, a spirit of adventure, and a sense of honor that Lawrence never felt while working for the British military in Cairo prior to his desert campaigns. 

The Arab 'irregulars' that fought beside Lawrence risked hearth and home in an immediate way. More than one of Lawrence's fighters, in fact, saw their homes destroyed by the Turks in retaliation for joining with the Arab revolt. More than one Arab also saw his village destroyed, and his family annihilated, during the panicked Turkish retreats from Palestine and western Jordan. And so the Arabs often risked not only their lives, but their families and tribes to fight the Turks--and sometimes each other. The Arab revolt involved a type of warfare that was less organized in the sense of mass bureaucracy and written protocol, and yet no less sophisticated in its nuance and complexity. 

And so Lawrence wrestles with the following, implicit idea throughout Seven Pillars of Wisdom: He senses that the Arab way of war is more virtuous, honorable, and personally fulfilling than the sort of violence that destroyed the lives of his friends and brothers along the European Western Front. But given that Lawrence knows the superiority of British warfare for battlefield outcomes (Lawrence always suspects the British will emerge triumphant), is it morally acceptable for him to dabble in Arab nationalism and 'desert warfare'? Lawrence believes that Arabia, Syria, and Mesopotamia rightfully belong to the Arabs--but he is a student of history, and knows that even as he props up a certain brand of Arab nationalism, he is setting in motion a thousand difficulties for hundreds of extant ethnic and religious groups living in the same region.

Throughout Seven Pillars Lawrence examines his conscience, and recognizes that ultimately he has fought this war to satisfy his own peculiar appetite for violence, warfare, and chivalry. Many of his Arab friends admire him for it, but he considers himself a sham. The Arab irregulars, in Lawrence's eyes, live with the virtues of the desert; but he, their leader, merely wears the costume--he possesses the heart, but not the mind.

The Arabs who followed Lawrence died at tremendous rates--nearly sixty of Lawrence's two-hundred personal bodyguards perished within a year. Their villages burned. Their children and wives lived unprotected, and hungry. 

The European powers, on the other hand, featured stronger, centralized state governments compared with Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Syria-Palestine. Even on the Western and Eastern fronts, preserved a macabre sense of decorum. Yes, terrible acts took place in the First World War--murder, rape, pillaging, poison gas and vicious trench fighting. But even then, the war in Europe obeyed strange rules: the taking of prisoners, the feeding of troops, and the separation between the war-front and the home-front. 

I conclude this letter with a couple of quotes from General Archibald Wavell, a man who fought alongside Lawrence in the Palestine campaign. 

 That is to say, Lawrence was too aware of who he was, and who he was not. He was British, and a bastard-born, and not of Arabia. His education positively dripped with the soaking benefits wrought from state-sanctioned security and comfort. But he fought alongside his friends as though he were an Arab prince. He never forgave himself. He loathed the Turks, and often justified his actions in the war as a chance to destroy something he loathed. In this light, Wavell viewed Lawrence as "a Hamlet who had slain his uncle neatly and efficiently at the beginning of Act II, and spent the remainder of the play in repenting his act and writing a long explanation of it to Horatio." (Wavell The Good Soldier, 1948, 59-61).

I think most people would say 'no.' Just like most people would refuse to follow Lawrence into Syria in 1911, before the war, much less in 1916, when the Arab revolt faced destruction along the shores of the Red Sea. But the people in our lives almost always say 'no.' That is what makes leadership, and art, and astonishing success so very rare. People say 'no,' because they are weak, and saying 'no' is easy.

And yet, people said 'yes' to making 'Lawrence of Arabia.' Perhaps it was perhaps, the sort of British thing to do, as when Lionel de Rothschild loaned Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli the money to purchase the Egyptian shares of the Suez Canal.

To return to Roger Ebert:

Ari Shavit, My Promised Land, New York: Spiegel and Grau of Random House Publishing (2013).

The nation of Israel, the last great colonial enterprise of the Western world, exists in a harsh, hot climate, surrounded by enemies that deny it a right to exist. For years, it served as beacon of democracy and Western military supremacy, but now it threatens to fall into theocracy and political isolation. Israeli journalist Ari Shavit presents his own personal history of Israel with My Promised Land, a fast-reading account of a young nation's struggles along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

Shavit drives his narrative forward with extensive interviews. Many of his discussions feature the complex heroes and villains of the Zionist enterprise: settlers, warriors, and spies; capitalists, socialists, and politicians. Though he cuts the interviews with dashes of biography, historical context, and personal reflection, in the main Shavit allows his protagonists to co-author his book, so that they can defend their hopes, dreams, and doubts.

Shavit begins with a chapter out of his own family history. In the closing moments of the nineteenth century, an English-Jewish ancestor visited Palestine for the first time. He surveyed the countryside, and settled there a few years later. The Jewish settlers of the late 19th century tackled the problem of creating a Jewish homeland in a way similar to other herculean colonial enterprises, such as the Suez Canal; they raised capital from abroad, and then added tremendous amounts of human labor. They bought land from the waning elite of the Ottoman Empire. When necessary, they forced the removal of the serfs and tribes that had occupied the land for centuries. Intellectually, the Jewish immigrants felt tied to Europe, but they knew that Europe no longer wanted them; in the desert they began to forge a new identity, one with less room for the individual spirit and conscience, and much more aggressive than what they inherited from their diaspora ancestors.

The European Jews, imitating European colonial powers, looked at Palestine as a backwards, empty land. They never saw the Arabs as inhabitants. They only saw an empty land open to the aspirations of Jewish nationalism. The Jewish settlers especially sought out the rich coastal soils of Palestine. They wanted collective economic success and secular socialism, not the restoration of Biblical landmarks in the hills to the east. In time, the disenfranchised Arab serfs began to push back against the newcomers with sporadic murders and assaults on Jewish settlements.

The Jews responded to the violence with calls for the forced migration of Arabs out of Palestine. By 1938, the language of David Ben Gurion echoed that of world leaders working elsewhere: "I support compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it."

Shavit then traces how individuals like Shmaryahu Gutman drew on ancient Jewish symbols of resistance, like the mass suicide at the Masada fortress in 73 CE, thus "using the Hebrew past to give depth to the Hebrew present and enable it to face the Hebrew future." A rootless nation searched for its Hebrew past like a long forgotten spring and, once rediscovered, held onto those ancient waters with emotions that tottered between tenacity and desperation.

Jewish survival in Palestine required collective organization for social, political, and military conquest. The end of the British Mandate heralded a new era of Zionism. The Zionist political leaders rushed into action in 1948 and sliced off a portion of the region designed to ensure a Jewish majority in the newborn country of Israel.

Shavit cannot help but look back at his country's history with awe, love, and pride--and so Shavit's presentation is as personal as it is insightful. As a journalist he expands that history by inserting the memories, fears, and dreams of other Israelis. His emotional exploration of Palestine brings with it a humor and sadness all its own, one that fights against the coldness of a historical narrative.

Perhaps his most effective chapter relates the crisis of Lydda, 1948, in its absolute tragedy. The fatigued, desperate Jewish soldiers scrambled to the very edge of the Arab village of Lydda. And then, assuming the worst, the soldiers (including Moshe Dayan) charged through town with armored vehicles, guns blazing. Israel's founding political leaders abstained from making a clear decision to force the removal of the Arabs from the village, thus preserving their reputation in Europe and America. The absence of oversight turned their young Israeli soldiers into aimless cannons which the Arab civilians had to dodge through flight. The Arabs abandoned their dignity and homes for the sake of momentary security, and straggled out of Lydda (and many other villages) on long, deadly marches. Throughout the early years of Israel, trepidation gnawed at the backbone of Jews and Arabs alike, prompting them to edge deeper into the depths of human behavior.

Interestingly, Shavit mourns the loss of the Israeli character that inspired Zionism in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. "On the one hand [Zionism] was a colonialist enterprise. It intended to save the lives of one people by the dispossession of another. In its first fifty years, Zionism was aware of this complexity and acted accordingly...but after 1967, and after 1973, all that changed...." The victories and traumas of 1967 and 1973 forever altered the political landscape of the Middle East, and the social fabric of Israeli society.

Israel initiated the Six Day War of 1967 to create a political buffer between themselves and the surrounding Arab nations, and in anticipation of an Arab attack just over the horizon. Israel caught its rivals completely off guard, and won the war with superior preparation and complete surprise. The victories of 1967 left Israel drunk with victory, and far more land than they had hoped for at the outset of their enterprise.

The occupied territories soon complicated the problems of Zionism. Many defeated Arabs were unable to immigrate to another country, and to this day they remain imprisoned in small tracts of land in Gaza and the West Bank. Though tragic and inhumane, the experiences in Gaza and the West Bank are not a second Holocaust. As Shavit says, 'no one can seriously think there is any real similarity. The problem is that there isn't enough lack of similarity. The lack of similarity is not strong enough to silence once and for all the evil echoes." And so the Israelis live in close and dangerous proximity to the people they displaced, and those people watch them day after day. The Israelis look back with wary eyes, "the jailers imprisoned by their jail."

Israelis desperately want to believe in their country--their nation--as established fact. They want release from the terrible fear that haunts the low-land orchards, the ancient alleys of Jerusalem, and the drug-soaked discotechs of Tel Aviv. But Shavit sees no release from the fear. Modern Israelis lack the secular hardness of their grandparents and great-grandparents. The melting pot of 1948 now congeals into separate small-minded elements: right-wing, left-wing, Oriental Jew, ultra-orthodox, capitalists, settlers, and rootless Palestinian refugees. The soft selfishness of individualism undermines the collective consciousness necessary for survival in the Middle East. He anticipates a second Holocaust, easier than the first due to the small spot of land upon which the Jews now live, and the tools of nuclear destruction that he believes will soon sprout among Israel's many Arab neighbors.

Shavit repeatedly calls his book a personal history. He offers somewhat skewed interpretations of many key events. For example, he calls the 1936 Arab revolt "a collective uprising of a national Arab-Palestinian movement," but leaves the revolt poorly explained and poorly reasoned, ignoring the way that economic modernization can threaten tribal honor; he also never identifies the key leaders of the revolt, or their localized motives.

Yet Shavit writes with a journalistic candor, and he conveys epic history. To tell his story, he chooses certain perspectives and subjects as stepping stones along the path. My Promised Land, therefore, never presumes to be a comprehensive volume. It assumes knowledge of pivotal figures like David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir. It also assumes a familiarity with British colonialism, the First and Second Worlds Wars, and the conflicts of 1948, 1967, and 1973. Yet Shavit's use of expanded, effusive stanzas of dialogue help paint the story of Israel in powerful, nuanced strokes of darkness and light.  

John Keegan, The Face of Battle. New York: Penguin, 1978.

In the Face of Battle, John Keegan explores the experience of soldiering in three significant (and very different) battlefields from British history. He begins with the mud, steel, chivalric culture of Agincourt. The pages turn, and soon the massive infantry squares appear through the gun-smoke shrouds of Waterloo. A century later, hundreds of thousands of soldiers die among the wire and trenches of the Somme.

Keegan adopts a rapidly moving third-person perspective to tell the story of each battle. The book's unusual structure helps Keegan peer deep into the mechanisms of organized violence. He examines the decision-making of generals, but frequently leaves the generals behind to focus on the what the great masses of troops actually saw and did during their respective battles. He examines the weapons and armor of the participants, but also asks about their hometowns and moral outlook. He differentiates between the officers and the enlisted soldiers, and while he does not ask about the source of class divisions, he shows enough interest in them to suggest how such divisions effect behavior on the battlefield. For each battle, he opens with a short examination of the battle's larger context--or at least the campaign of which it was a part. He then examines the particulars of the battle, with its turns, stages, and outcomes. He then assesses the practicalities of the various matchups that occurred. In Agincourt, for example, he asks how archers fared against infantry and cavalry, and what close-combat looked like to an infantryman in 1415. After examining the action, he addresses particular moral puzzles that each arise during each battle. Why did Henry V demand the execution of his French prisoners? Why did the British leave their wounded on the field at Waterloo? Why did soldiers of the First World War propel themselves out of the trenches and into harm's way? He takes what he learns from all this and applies it to a final chapter, where he considers the future of war, and the changes of technology that effect it; he ultimately supposes that war will grow increasingly horrific, regardless of the perks and amenities nations attempt to provide their armies, such as pensions and air conditioned tanks.

Keegan's book celebrates its three battles as moments of human interest, filled with deep failings and horrific exaltations. His emphasis on personal action and individual decision-making wins steep dividends. He recognizes that "ordinary soldiers do not think of themselves, in life-and-death situations, as subordinate members of whatever formal military organization it is to which authority has assigned them, but as equals within a very tiny group...." As a consequence, much of battle consists of leaders attempting to hold individuals to a collective fate, while at the same time trying to break the will of individuals in the opposing force. Thus, he pays keen attention to why Napolean's heavy cavalry units never quite crossed swords with the British infantry squares, but instead skirted their ranks, fled, and charged again. And he shows that French men-at-arms avoided confronting archers, not necessarily because of the danger archers presented, but because could find no honor or monetary reward for attacking and capturing individuals from such a low station.

Keegan, in short, unpacks the physical and psychological effects of warfare from the perspective of the individual, and then assesses the gritty details that make warfare so untenable, yet so horribly persistent throughout the years. As a work of history, Keegan grounds it in three very specific times and places, rather than attempting a generalized psychological exploration of organized violence. It is all the more convincing for his deliberate attempts to evoke specific moments in history: the mud-choked rise of infantry from the trenches, the screaming of horses before a fully-formed square. 

Latimer, J. (2004). Burma: The forgotten war. London: John Murray. 610 pages.

The longest land campaign of the Second World War took place from 1942 to 1945 in the villages, cities, plains, jungles, wetlands, rice paddies, and mountains of Burma, a British colonial holding crushed in its turn after the Japanese ripped Singapore from Britain's tired imperial hands. Jon Latimer recounts the story of that campaign in Burma: The forgotten war. The British soldiers fighting in the campaign rightly felt overshadowed by the exploits of the Allies in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. History gives little attention to the campaign. The Allies won the war against Japan in the Pacific. And they won the war against Germany and Italy in Europe. Perhaps more accurately, they dominated the Axis powers with superior industrial capacity and manpower. In Burma, resources remained limited for all involved, though the Americans sent a relative fortune over 'the hump' of mountains between Burma and China to reinforce the static army of Chang Kai-Shek; but all that wealth never encouraged his active participation in the war against Japan; instead, he harbored his resources for the slow-burning fight against domestic communist forces. Meanwhile, the British and Japanese scrapped together whatever forces they could muster and uselessly grappled for control over a country that wanted nothing to do with them. Though the Japanese conquered Burma, they never gained a significant foothold along the east Indian frontier.

Yet Latimer's reuse of the phrase 'forgotten war' seems a misnomer. His book makes use of characters that captured the popular imagination for years. Mountbatten, Aulincheck, Wavell, and Slim were the last great generals of the British Empire. American general 'Vinegar' Joe Stilwell spat at the 'limeys' and hacked at the 'Japs' in a largely fruitless attempt to stir the Chinese forces into action. Orde Wingate made enemies with nearly every other British officer in the Indian Army, but while fighting deep behind the Japanese lines with his 'Chindit' guerrilla forces; after his death, Stilwell gained command of the Chindits and threw them against some of the strongest Japanese defenses. And the Japanese Lieutenant General Mutaguchi drove his 65,000 strong force so incessantly against the Indian frontier that 50,000 of his soldiers died, mostly of starvation and disease. The remnants of the Japanese forces dug in throughout Burma but put up little effective resistance. These characters do not speak softly. Nor are they easily forgotten. Yet the horror and meaninglessness of the campaign speaks to a nihilism so aware and so sharp that it must be human, and so incessant that it trivializes the heroics of its participants.

In the opening pages, Latimer explicitly ties himself to the theme of budding Burmese nationalism, but the subsequent chapters only lightly pursue that topic. In the main, the book examines the four year land and air campaign waged across the Burmese landscape, principally by British and Japanese forces. Without a doubt, Latimer shows that the multi-ethnic citizens of Burma suffered tremendously during the course of the war, but Latimer's gaze usually focuses on colorfully rendered wartime experiences of soldiers, usually at their most dramatic moments of their lives. Thus, Latimer fills page after page with farewells to dying friends and rapid-fire character sketches gleaned from diaries, reports, and published memoirs of the war. He also conveys the multi-ethnic nature of the British forces, and the hardships faced by the poorly equipped Chinese forces that Stilwell dragged into Burma. Yet contrary to the author's stated theme, the Burmese people make almost no appearance.

The book contains no maps. The absence of maps proves a boon for spurring the reader to imagine the terrain from the ground, rather than like a god. But maps helpfully express the relationship between martial forces, as well as political, social, and geographic variations. When properly prepared, maps can also dispel any notion of a linear battlefield narrative, which certainly did not occur in Burma. So the decision seems puzzling. [The BBC, however, has produced a useful series of animated maps about the campaign.]

While not quite a comprehensive study of the Burma campaign, Latimer's volume proves both able and useful for any scholar interested in the 'feel' of the fighting. He strongly depicts the horrors of close combat, as well as the wild emotional swings between defeat and victory that each side faced in turn. He deserves credit for his depictions of Japanese soldiers; he never shies away from their brutality, but also reveals their humanity. His explicit theme--the Burmese struggle for independence--hides too much in the corners of the book, but the hefty remainder proves worthwhile.

In the critique above, I did not integrate some of the most engaging ideas I found in Latimer's volume. I will list a few of them here in the form of quotations. 

"While what is presented here is fundamentally a military history, the war in Burma does not lend itself well to a single treatment. Nevertheless, a single theme runs through it: the struggle of the Burmese people for independence after sixty years of occupation" (1).

"Some time after the war a memorial was unveiled near Rangoon dedicated to the '27,000 men of the Commonwealth forces who died in Assam and Burma in the defence of freedom ...'. Given the terrible regime in Burma for most of the time since, one might question whether the war fought between 1941 and 1945 was for 'freedom.'" (1-2).

"By 1941, with 1 1/4 million men in China and 1 million in Formosa, Korea and the home islands, Japan lacked large manpower reserves and to provide five armies (corps) to strike south meant scraping the sides of the barrel, with age limits widened in both directions and student deferments cancelled. Brutality in training became yet more harsh and standards of discipline diluted, resulting in an attitude that crime against superiors was far more serious than crimes against natives. Despite its modernity, much Japanese equipment compared unfavourably with Western models ... funnelling of manpower into the infantry and their ability to live off the land meant the Japanese appeared far more numerous than Allied forces ... Plainly the Imperial Japanese Army was not on a par with that of 1905, or even 1937" (39). 

"Although overshadowed by the fall of Singapore, the battle of the Sittang on 22/23 February ranks as a defining moment in the decline and fall of the British Empire" (58).
[While it's true that Slim called the defeat at Sittang bridge the 'decisive battle of the first campaign,' Latimer's rhetoric overstates the case. The importance of Sittang bridge cannot measure up to Singapore, the largest capitulation in British military history.]

*This isn't a quote, but it seems like an important point of emphasis in Latimer's book. Churchill swapped Auchinleck and Wavell in 1941. Auchinleck won a fresh round of North African victories shortly thereafter. Back in Burma, the Japanese declaration of war forced Wavell into a fighting retreat while at the head of soldiers he barely knew. Wavell insisted that his forces maintain an aggressive posture, and that they counter-attack at every opportunity. Latimer finds Wavell out of touch with the situation on the ground, as offensive action was virtually impossible for the poorly prepared British Indian Army; to some extent, Latimer sneers at what he considers Wavell's foolish refusal to organize a more effective retreat. But the British Indian Army was a totally different force that that on the shores up North Africa, whatever the similarities on paper. Both commands featured imperial forces of mixed ethnicity. Both were motorized. The language barriers might be the same, and pose similar problems of command, but the appropriateness of the training, equipment, and logistics for the particular environment differed completely. AJP Taylor suggested in Warlords that Churchill's sacking of commanders helped spur action and relieve exhaustion. True. But Churchill's action also inspired massive confusion. 

A quote from Wavell: "It is lack of this knowledge of the principles and practice of military movement and administration--the 'logistics' of war, some people call it--which puts what we call amateur strategists wrong, not the principles of strategy themselves, which can be apprehended in a very short time by any reasonable intelligence." (121 in Latimer; also in Wavell's 'The Good Soldier).

"The Japanese did not penetrate as far as Tamu, even with patrols ... In reality no more than a village, it was strewn with hundreds of abandoned vehicles ... filled with grisly emaciated figures who had reached the village after the monsoon had broken" (121).

"Japanese victory was devastatingly complete: British prestige had suffered another hammer blow, discrediting their concept of protecting, civilizing and supervising in Asia" (121).

"[Wavell] was experiencing difficulties with Stilwell, who planned operations without reference to Wavell, 'and I think, without much reference to his staff here who seem to know little ... His senior staff officers here gives me the impression of being overawed by Stilwell and afraid of representing the true administrative picture.' Wavell felt he was effectively communicating with Stilwell through Washington. Certainly Stilwell never showed any interest in administration or logistics, realities that constantly exercised Wavell's mind ..." (131).

"... Orde Charles Wingate's character was a blend of mysticism, passion and complete self-confidence tinged with darkest depression; he was obsessive rude and overbearing. But as things stood, the scheme proposed by this 'broad-shouldered, uncouth, almost simian officer', as Major Bernard Fergusson noted, offered the only prospect of action. In 1946 Fergusson wrote: 'Wingate would do any evil that good might come. He saw his object very clearly in front of him, and to achieve it he would spare no friend or enemy; he would lie; he would intrigue; he would bully, cajole and deceive. He was a hell of a great man and few people liked him.'" (Latimer 155-156; Fergusson, Beyond the Chindwin, pp.20-21). 

"It was Burma's misfortune to have been used as a base for the Japanese 'March on Delhi' and to have suffered from concentrated Allied air attacks against railways and other transportation facilities from 1943 onwards. All the cities along the main north-south axis suffered partial demolition, and the countryside was strewn with ordnance left by both sides ... the Burmese who sought to lead their country to the sunny uplands of Independence found they had to take over a ruined country" (431).

Sometimes Latimer's historical opinion lacks a clear perspective. When writing about allied victories at Mandalay and Meiktila, for example, he notes that the Japanese defenders "had orders to resist to the last--orders that were largely futile since, as Kimura admitted later, 'the only reason it was held at all was for its prestige value'" (392). In what sense is prestige ever futile? He seems to imply 'prestige' lacks strategic value. But it seems to me that prestige is a fundamental spur to war-like action. His writing seems strange, or possibly meaningless in the wider context of the Burma campaign. 

 Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929.

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own famously serves as both an essay and a novel; it is a call for androgynous authorship, and yet serves as a summons for women to equally partake in artistic flourishing.

  Woolf delivers her essay under the guise of a false identity; she tells us we may call her "Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Charmichael or by any name you please--it is not of any importance." This device distances Woolf from the popular notion of authors as heroic, path-breaking pioneers, capable of fully reinventing the world around them. For Woolf, specifically identifying a writer twice troubles the issues surrounding 'women and fiction.' First, the myth of the heroic, path-breaking writer defines the purpose of writing as jockeying for hierarchical status, rather than the more complex terms of artistic generation. Second, the myth shrugs aside economic, social, and political obstacles that stand in the way of women and writing. Woolf pursues achievement, not heroics, and when exploring the theme of 'women and literature' she coolly rejects the notion of settling for the pioneering glory of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot and the handful of other notable forerunners of women's literary achievement. 

Women writers, Woolf avers, rarely exist, and when they do they fail to achieve the greatest heights of literary accomplishment. Why? Because they lack economic, mental, and physical security--they lack a room with a lock on the door, and five hundred pounds a year of independent income. They also lack a strong tradition of writing. Society expects men to write. And so society provides men with education, job opportunities, and the mental freedom to produce literature. But society rarely expects women to write, and certainly not to write of their own concerns. Rather, society prefers women to address the concerns of men, and to accommodate those concerns in both thought and action. 

In the modern era, both men and women suffer from the emergence of "sex consciousness," which clouds writing with unnecessary dimorphic tension. Woolf considers it fatal to defend or apologize on the basis of gender. Thus, she disparages self-conscious moments like those found in Charlotte Bronte's Villette, where the lead character (a woman) mounts a defense of women vis a vis the opposite sex. Sex consciousness works both ways, so that Rudyard Kipling's adolescent masculine mind is just as hamstrung by the emergence of sex consciousness as any woman writer. Men and women, she asserts, mutually depend upon one another as writers. The best writers, she holds, like Shakespeare and Coleridge, write androgynously. Woolf ends her speech on a note of pessimism. Poor writers cannot achieve much of anything in Britain; their output stands as "poor poetry" that has "not a dog's chance" in the British commonwealth. And modern women, who "have less freedom the son of an Athenian slave," are very, very poor. Yet she hopes that women can, with decades of steady work, eventually create an androgynous master of literary arts--a place for a Judith Shakespeare to flourish alongside her brother William.

 Woolf's lecture revels in the difficulties and tensions produced through its narrative complex structure. Rather than speak directly to an audience, Woolf assumes an amorphous identity as a fictional woman; Woolf's text exhorts other writers to 'be yourself,' and yet Woolf writes in the form of another person. Further, Woolf refuses to identify her listeners as women until the middle of the 'lecture,' perhaps to stir androgynous sympathies in the mind of the reader. The complexity of book's structure creates delicious tension between word and action. What begins as an erudite essay on women's fiction morphs into a complex critique of writing as an art form, and a critique of art as existence.

In this critique, I have not mentioned Mary Breton's eye-opening dinner as an outsider at male-centric 'Oxbridge' University. Or the day she spends at the library to understand the relationship between man's obsession with writing about woman, and yet man's historical refusal to allow any woman to craft that literary discourse. Woolf tackles all this, and more. Erudite yet playful, scattered yet clear, Virginia Woolf invents a stained-glass approach to literary criticism--the abstract blends with the iconic, filters nature, and then achieves the transcendent. 

Dutt, B.C. Mutiny of the Innocents. (1971). Bombay: Sindhu Publications.

B.C. Dutt's Mutiny of the Innocents offers a razor sharp first-person account of a forgotten episode in the history of India's long struggle against foreign rule. In the early months of 1946, low-ranking sailors in the Royal Indian Navy began supporting Indian independence, but only after years of loyal service to the wider empire. Their sudden change of heart bewildered both British military leaders like General Claude Auchinleck and Indian politicians like Mahatma Gandhi.

Dutt's story, however, begins with his entrance into the Royal Indian Navy as a teenager. A radio and signal operator, Dutt and his fellow Indian sailors served loyally throughout the war, but lost enthusiasm for their task as profligate racism sets a clear divide between themselves and white service members. Despite the racism, Dutt worked hard, and took pride in his work. He was a cog in a wheel, but thrived in his own way. At the end of the war, Dutt found himself stationed at the HMIS Talwar, the shore establishment where he first learned his trade as a signalman. For Dutt, and his fellow veterans, the future looked bleak. The post-war navy offered few opportunities for advancement; outside the military, jobs were scarce. And many Indians viewed the sailors and soldiers of the Indian military as mercenaries more interested in lining their pockets with British coin than serving their homeland. Dutt's experiences with racism, and his own questions about his role in the British empire, eventually led him to take action in support of Indian independence. Gathering in the canteen of the Talwar, Dutt and a few like-minded conspirators engaged in well-timed acts of minor sabotage. For the most part, they merely distracted sentries and pasted revolutionary slogans on barrack walls. They timed their subversive activities to maximize the embarrassment of their officers.

In February 1946, the authorities caught Dutt. But he refused to cooperate or name his fellow conspirators. Further, he declared himself a political prisoner, rather than an insubordinate sailor. In a political situation already fraught with tension, this caught his superior officers off guard. They tried to respond with restraint in order to keep the situation quiet. But the opposite happened. Dutt's slight success catapulted him into the spotlight. Other naval ratings used a common complaint--the poor quality of navy chow--to rally other sailors to the cause. The ensuing rebellion more resembled a student protest or worker strike rather than a violent insurrection. What began as small demonstrations of discontent expanded into a brief (but bright) flame of outright rebellion, and came to be known as the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny. It ultimately involved upwards of 12,000 ratings (low-ranking sailors). The ratings seized ships and shore establishments throughout Bombay; ratings in Calcutta, Karachi, and elsewhere also gained control of their vessels. The ratings adopted the language of the nationalist leaders, and formed a strike committee to lead the way. The ratings offered to hand over the navy to nationalist leaders in Congress and Muslim League, but received a cold response from everyone except the Communists Party.  

 Congress leaders, especially Sadar Vallabhbhai Patel, quickly organized a truce between the mutineers and the British authorities. Very few ratings lost their lives, and only a few ships were damaged. But for enthusiastic participants like B.C. Dutt, the short-lived mutiny taught them an indelible lesson on the limits of India's revolutionary politics. The nationalist leaders had struggled for decades to achieve Indian independence. Now the leaders could already see the finish line, and yearned to reach it. The British were clearly on the way out. The mutiny, rather than helping the nationalist leaders achieve their objective, threatened to disrupt the delicate balance of power of domestic politics. Besides, the nationalist leadership consisted of lawyers and industrialists and cloaked themselves in the mores of non-violence; they distrusted military personnel out of habit, and the young naval ratings now asking for their help were no exception. Thus, the complex realities of nationalist politics quickly eclipsed the RIN mutiny.

A year and a half later, India won its independence from imperial rule, but at the cost of an independent Pakistan. Jinnah, the first leader of Pakistan, kept an earlier promise and allowed Muslim mutineers to apply for positions in the Pakistan navy. In India, however, newly-minted Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (and the rest of the Congress leadership) opted to keep the mutineers out of the service. The Royal Indian Navy discharged D.C. Butt quickly and quietly; he tried to join Nehru's navy, but without success. He eventually made his way back to Bombay and became a reporter with the Free Press Journal, the newspaper that most closely covered the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny.

We do not often think of mutineers as innocents, but B.C. Dutt's book makes a convincing case that these young men truly did not know what they were getting themselves into. The book begins with a forward from S. Natarajan, the editor of the Free Press Journal at the time of the mutiny. He describes his own interest in the mutiny, and his careful decision to chronicle the efforts of the naval ratings when a few members of their party appeared on his doorstep on 18 February 1946. Though the mutiny ended in meekness, it shared dangerous echoes with rebellions that began elsewhere in the world. When the book transitions to Dutt's voice, the account assumes an uncanny charm. He records the events without malice or resentment. He articulates the views of his enemies with remarkable generosity and restraint.

In particular, Dutt chronicles the motivations of the Indian officers that remained loyal to the navy, and the actions of Commander King, a white officer whose racist language helped the mutiny spiral out of control. In other accounts (including Banerjee's The RIN Strike and Sarkar's Towards Freedom series) King stands a mysterious and foolish monster. But in Dutt's account, Commander King emerges as a complicated and surprisingly sympathetic figure that lacked the political wherewithal and leadership skills to contain the misbegotten mutiny. Like Dutt and King, the ratings and officers initially caught in the strike simply lacked the political sophistication to achieve their objectives.

B.C. Dutt published Mutiny of the Innocents in 1971. Reflecting on his actions of twenty-five years prior, Dutt comes across as an astute observer of human nature. He also has the wisdom to reassess his actions in the rearview mirror, and place them in historical perspective. At times, a sense of humor shines through the book's pages, as when after a late-night attempt at revolutionary graffiti, naval sentries catch Dutt with his hands covered in glue.

Dutt's book stands as a riveting account of political failure in waning shadows of the British raj. Dutt managed, for a short time at least, to rally sailors to take a political stand against the British empire; the rebellion's failure, as Dutt states at the close of the book, was probably inevitable. His revolution failed, but his book succeeds. 

Kenneth R. Koedinger, Julie L. Booth, David Klahr. 'Instructional Complexity and the Science to Constrain It.' Science. Vol 342, 22 Nov 2013, Pg 935-937. <Link: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6161/935.full>

My review of James Lang's On Course emphasized the practical attributes of successful teaching. My review of Mark Edmundson's Why Teach? examined current trends in academic life, and pleads for a more spiritually challenging curriculum. On Course uses some references to empirical data and peer-reviewed studies, but seeks mainly to provide firm guidance to young educators. Why Teach? eschews peer review to trace one intellectual's Walden-like musings on the modern intellectual wilderness. My sympathies lay with Edmundson, but my need for practical guidance brought me closer to Lang. 

As luck would have it, this week's issue of Science included an article on education research. As with most articles in Science, the purpose of the piece is to establish what exactly a particular field can and cannot say based on the data available, and then to suggest new avenues of research. When it comes to human learning, these researchers find the entire field a chaotic mess. The authors attempt to build a few categorical fences to clarify things for both researchers and educators, but also use a little math to show the complexity of the issue. 

Here is the math they use to demonstrate complexity. "If we consider just 15 of the 30 instructional techniques we identified, three alternative dosage levels, and the possibility of different dosage choices for early and late instruction, we compute 3^(15*2) or 205 trillion options... the vast size of this space reveals that simple two-sided debates about improving learning--in the scientific literature, as well as in the public forum--obscure the complexity that a productive science of instruction must address" (936).  

In other words, the potential for research is almost overwhelmingly vast, and conducting it might prove overwhelmingly expensive. To encourage research rather than surrender, the authors suggest a framework within which future studies might operate. You can read their article if you wish to fully understand their suggestions, but I will briefly examine one aspect of their paper.

The authors produced a helpful table that reviews some of the current findings on 'instruction.' Much of the table draws on Koedinger, Corbett, and Perfetti's learning-to-instruction theoretical framework. Below, the authors of the Science article fit thirty nifty principles within three categories the authors call 'the functions of instruction' (936). 

The reason I find this table helpful is that one can interpret its arguments as practical advice. (Aside: While the authors do not explicitly limit the applicability of the graph to teaching mathematics, I suspect that such a limitation might exist for at least some of the principles). To my remembrance, the authors' findings do not greatly vary from the methods suggested in a typical mathematics textbook. That's probably because human educators have been in the business of understanding human learning for a very long time; when an educator fails, it can be because either they or the student do not care whether learning occurs--or perhaps they are not in a position to care due to environmental factors. Anyhow, the chart is comforting, it feels like smoking a cigarette in snowfall. 

Some books should be articles, and some articles should be books. The lead author, Koedinger, has published extensively in his particular field (he earned an MS in Computer Science and PhD in Cognitive Science), but has not written a book on the subject. A book could include practical examples of his work, and show how he stumbles into and out of research problems. It would also give him the room to demonstrate that his research is useful to educators, as opposed to researchers that scientifically examine education. It is common scientific practice to laconically claim one's work has 'policy implications,' and yet have absolutely no significant evidence of one's ability to implicate, change, or effectively argue policy. Scientists should perhaps engage in politics more often than they do. 

God knows I probably could have benefited from some of Professor Koedinger's knowledge when I myself haltingly studied geometry. "To the field, Koedinger, to the field."

                                                                       *****

Clearly, we are far from 'perfecting' college instruction. Human limitations represent a permanent obstacle to ideal outcomes. In the face of those limitation, it is sometimes helpful to step back and use qualitative empirical studies to think through the purpose and effectiveness of college education. In this vein, the books of Ken Bain (president of the Best Teachers Institute) are helpful. Bain wrote a book entitled What the Best College Teachers Do (2004), and another called What the Best College Students Do (2012). The former book reported the findings of a fifteen year study that followed the habits and practices of some of the most successful educators in the United States. Not all together surprisingly, he found that the best instructors combined a deep knowledge of their subject with a belief in student learning. These two principles seem easy, but they are not easy to accomplish. Many (most?) teachers are out of touch with the most challenging questions in their discipline, and many others lack sympathy for the importance of undergraduate education.