The Military Could Learn From "real Education" As Well

While our primary mission is to defend the nation, the U.S. military is also one of the country’s leading educators. The U.S. military operates three service academies, alongside the several state military academies. Countless students attend college on military scholarships. After serving, many veterans attend college on the G.I. Bill. Education is also a part of active duty military service. Both officers and enlisted service members are regular recipients of instruction.

So, as a serving officer in the US Marine Corps, I turned to Charles Murray’s Real Education with great eagerness.

Real Education’s argument is that the current American system of civilian higher education offers a one-size approach, which does not fit the needs of most students. The one-size approach encourages all students to strive for a college degree.

This noble goal, however, leads to some less welcome outcomes. Four years of college costs upward of a quarter million dollars. Facing immense debt, many college students opt for a course of study that will give them a realistic chance to pay down their debts. In the process, college becomes an expensive trade school. Others fail to finish on time or at all. And still others finish college with a degree in the humanities when they would have been happier to have spent the time instead preparing for a particular career.

Murray’s answer is to recognize that there are two types of students. For one student, the purpose of education is to provide the basic skills that are necessary to have a successful professional life. Murray calls these students the “work-bound.” For the other student, the end goal of education is to learn for its own sake, the sheer enjoyment of deepening one’s understanding of philosophy, literature, history, and the sciences.

Murray proposes that both kinds of students complete the same first stage of education, where core curriculum subjects from ancient history to modern literature would be taught. As for the second stage, Murray departs from the widely accepted tenet that upon graduating high school students should seek a college degree. For the student who seeks technical expertise, Murray recommends various alternatives to four years of “brick and mortar” higher education. After high school, work-bound students might attend college for a year or two – the time sufficient to master the particular classes that are crucial to their professional development, but cannot be taught at the high school level. They might also seek to acquire knowledge at online institutions, community colleges, technical schools, or by apprenticing. While the academically-motivated would still hold a college degree as their desired goal, Murray proposes certification in a particular field as an equal alternative for the work-bound student – similar to the system that already exists for attorneys, medical specialists, and various craftsmen.

Murray would argue that his model of education would better serve the ideals of social equality, mutual respect and upward mobility than current practice. It’s striking that the US military –the most racially integrated and most meritocratic institution in American life – apparently agrees.

Early in their careers, today’s officers learn that their role is an important but limited one. During their initial schooling, for example, Marine Corps lieutenants are trained to give “mission-type orders,” which avoid ever directing enlisted Marines how an objective should be completed. The key lesson is that the knowledge of how things get done is fundamentally democratic. It comes from those in society who are the closest to the facts on the ground. In Real Education, Murray is similarly insistent that the academically-gifted must acquire humility.

As a result of their military training, meanwhile, many enlisted men and women across today’s armed forces have already acquired the sophisticated skills that Murray believes can be taught outside of the traditional “brick and mortar” environment. Technical specialties such as aviation require enlisted personnel to master a complicated period of instruction. Our military is far from a stratified society in which the officers are born with a silver spoon and served tea in staterooms by 'enlisted' stewards. Today’s officers and enlisted men operate instead as essential parts in a single whole.

The experience of today’s military might have also addressed perhaps the greatest shortcoming of Real Education. It is not what Murray says about those termed “work bound,” but what he does not say. They are the basic barometer for the health of society. It is just as – if not more – important for the work bound therefore in the course of their education to experience the same “rigor in thinking about virtue and the good” that Murray believes to be a necessary part of an elite academic education. This is already happening in the training of our nation’s enlisted service members, whose willingness to act heroically in repeated combat deployments stands as lasting proof of their fundamental goodness. And looking at what our enlisted service members have accomplished throughout the world in recent years shows just how much our society ought to focus on giving those who want a life of action the real education that they need to succeed. Our future depends on them.