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. 

 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. 

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. 

Lang, James M. On Course: A week-by-week guide to your first semester of college teaching. Harvard, 2008.

I once heard a social scientist remark that no one attempts to scientifically study social behavior unless they are one consultation away from a diagnosis of autism; as a consequence, all professors require assistance when it comes to socializing and empathizing with others. Perhaps the social scientist overstated the situation. But it is true that graduate students and young assistant professors represent a thin slice of academia, and that the skills that make them nascent researchers may interfere with their ability to relate basic aspects of their discipline to college students.

James M. Lang's On Course seeks to elevate first-time attempts at college teaching. The book proceeds with a practical guide to common first-time problems: constructing a syllabus, using technology, planning and delivering lectures, hosting discussions, working in small groups, and much more. At each stage, he offers concrete ways of approaching common problems, and suggests various rationale for making decisions about the predicament at hand. For example, when discussing student learning, Lang argues that understanding Piaget's mental models and William Perry's theory of intellectual development can provide a teacher with ways of listening to a student's troubled reaction to classroom material; theories of learning can also help a teacher take action to improve student learning, depending upon cues students offer. Why are these specific examples helpful? Because in offering the examples, Lang provides a rationale for teacher behavior, and footnotes their attention to additional literature; this is the apt way to convince a researcher that they are operating on solid ground when interacting with college students.

Lang explicitly structures the book so a teacher can read a chapter per week; if the teacher begins reading the book at the start of the semester, the chapters will generally align with problems that often crop up during particular phases of an academic season. Thus, Lang provies intermittent brain food. This is an important feature for time-strapped instructors. Lang writes with friendly confidence--he offers to serve as the angel on the shoulder, guiding instructors towards best practices as understood in the academic literature on teaching. Without sneering at non-tenure track instructors, he offers measured advice on managing a teaching-research balance for those seeking a permanent faculty position.

On Course states up front that it does not provide the final word on 'best practices' in college education, nor does it offer an explicit philosophical argument regarding the purpose of a university education. Instead, the book serves as an academic survival guide. It can improve the first-semester experience for instructors--and more importantly, it can improve the experience of their students. 

Mark Edmundson. Why Teach? In Defense of Real Education. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.


In Why Teach? Mark Edmundson addresses vital issues in modern education in the most exasperating style possible. If you believe that education and training are not synonymous, you will be annoyed that Edmundson writes about it so carelessly. And if you take umbrage with attacks on post-modernism, college athletics, and watery reading lists devoid of enduring texts, then I hope that one day you change your mind. But I will not ask you to read Edmundson's book--he will only harden your heart.

Instead, I would beg you to read (or re-read) Spinoza's Political-Theological Treatise, Plato's Gorgias and Republic, Rousseau's Emile, and Bronte's Villete. These authors do not often agree with one another, but they write well, and care deeply about learning. They not only challenge the modern spirit of the age, but offer a center and a purpose as well. Even if they are not totally correct, one could follow their footsteps and become a more compassionate and interesting human being.

Why Teach? consists of a series of essays that fall under three closely related areas: the shift towards treating students as consumers, the goals of students while at a university, and the goals of teachers at a university. In each essay, Edmundson pushes against the shortcuts often taken in academic teaching. He argues that popular paradigms reduce students from burgeoning thinkers to opaque receptacles; it does not matter whether the paradigms come from Marx, or Derrida, or MTV, because the deliberate use of any prescriptive lens too much distorts the radical freshness of a liberal education. Paradigms fertilize young minds, but too often fail to measure the mind's current chemical balance, or take heed of what storm clouds lurk on the broader horizons of life. A good education is conservative in its suggestions, but radical in its consequences. This is the gist of Edmundson's book. It's pretty important. It suggests that specialists should not to dose their students with a narrow set of arguments, however confidently reasoned. It  suggests that teachers must view their students as potential guardians of philosophical inquiry, and not just prospective customers or doomed malcontents.

The best chapters in the book highlight Edmundson's own journey as he struggled towards a university education. The worst chapters in the book coldly burn with weak verbs and straw-men attacks.

Edmundons' style aggravates more often than his argument enlightens. For those interested in engaging in such debates, I advise turning to older texts. For those that insist on reading newer literature, consider Alan Bloom's curmudgeonly 20th century essay, The Closing of the American Mind. But to hell with modernity: read Plato's Republic. Plato likes you better than Bloom or Edmundson, and yet disagrees with you more.