EDUCATION BY IMMEDIATE OBJECTIVES

LIEUTENANT-COLONEL PAUL AZAN, in his monumental volume, "The Warfare of To-day," makes learning how the first step in the waging of war. The whole nation must be put to school. The infantrymen, the artillerymen, the aviators, the engineers, the cavalrymen, the medical arm, the quartermaster's corps, the railwaymen, the motor transport service, the intelligence department, the topographic branch, the ammunition makers, the ordnance makers, the shipbuilders, the maritime transport men, the convoy, the farmers, the merchants, the bankers, the manufacturers, in short, the entire population, must be taught, individual by individual, to take its place in the line or behind the line and perform its work of saving, consuming and producing the goods which are needed, be they merely self-denial, collaborating confidence, provision for the soldiers' dependents, assistance in conscripting and preparing the forces, shoes, clothing, arms, all the multifarious requirements, not of an army, but of a nation in arms. Two great principles, he believes, dominate the process of education thus set afoot: specialization and coördination. All must be trained; his discussion concerns only the combatants.

"The basis of organization for training rests upon certain extremely simple principles, so simple in

fact that they seem almost self-evident. Yet, as a matter of fact, they have been misunderstood in the past and still are misunderstood to-day. They are the following:

1. No army can be trained without teachers.

2. The teachers must be trained before the troops can be.

3. To train these teachers there must be schools for officers of all arms.

4. To organize these schools it is necessary to bring together the officers best qualified to give instruction.

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No army can be trained without teachers. This principle is evident; why is it so often misunderstood? The people who misunderstand it are in error as to the meaning of the word 'training.' Training, to their minds, means drill in bodily movements and attitudes, marches and alignments, rifle practice and bayonet exercises, etc. A knowledge of these things is supposed to be enough to make a trained soldier. This mistake has been made in every army by those who believed that the military profession consisted in the accomplishment of certain rites, and not in the apprenticeship for war. Teachers whose knowledge did not extend beyond these rites could teach nothing more to the officers and soldiers confined to their care; such teachers are quite incapable of teaching modern warfare. This is the idea which so many of my friends have misunderstood when they have asked me: 'How long a time do you think is needful to train an officer?' I have invariably replied: 'A

few months if he is intelligent and put under the care of a competent teacher; a year, eighteen months, or two years if his teacher is mediocre; and, in the latter case, all that he will accomplish will be to lead his men to be slaughtered.” 1

Not very long ago the whole world believed that a soldier could not be trained in less than two, or perhaps even three, years; at least, that he could not be trained in a shorter time to meet and withstand the onslaught of a thoroughly disciplined army such as the German troops were. America has been giving herself a new notion of her own resourcefulness and ability in the last eighteen months, and at the same time she has been giving herself a new notion of training. The ritualistic conception of warfare, she has discarded, and the ritualistic conception of training for warfare; and with that goes, as it is bound to go, the ritualistic conception of education of all sorts. Never before have the youth of the land had a chance to show what they could do under favorable conditions. Never before have they been able to break away from routinary prescriptions of content, hours, methods, and subject matter. Our universities and colleges, with their traditions of learning made in Germany and many of their professors trained there, set up before them so many blind absolutes demanding devotion that it was not until Germany herself forced us to it that we had the temerity to break away from the intellectual ritualism which she had spun. Absolutism in learning is no more defensible than absolutism in government.

1 Azan: "The Warfare of To-day," pp. 53-54, Houghton Mifflin Co.

They grew up together the soldier for his Kaiser, the citizen for his state, the musician for his art, the scholar for his science, all perverted humans who insist upon reversing the real relations of life and doing their utmost to turn bread into a stone. If we had been really critical, we would not have needed the war to teach us that German intellectualism, with its adorations and its scholastic rites, is as little like the genuine training which democratic intelligence demands as the formal but king-glorifying labor of the Alexandrians was like the genuine search for knowledge of the democratic Athenians. Just as German lower education had Kaiserism for its object, so German higher education had the ornamentation of the empire, rather than service to the citizens, for its aim. It studied the classics, but not for the sake of their humanity; it studied psychology, but only to forget the imponderables, the consideration of which is the chief reason for studying psychology; it studied religion only as a series of ignoble and regrettable human failings and then proceeded to make a religion of its own more cruel and inhuman than any which its study had unearthed. It studied ethics only to discover that morality is the will of the stronger. It studied international law only to put itself outside the pale of international law. History law. History to it meant the glorification of the deeds of the German nation; philosophy, the identification of the absolute with the German spirit. The conclusion of all its instruction is that the state is God on earth. Of coordination of effort, there was enough there and to

spare. Every science contributed its share to the demonstration of the ineffable, all-glorious empire. All roads led to that result, for of specialization, of patient consulting of facts and following where they led, there was very little. Of training for war,

there was more than enough; but of training for humanity, there was none, though they did much that to an uncritical world passed for that. Such results as were attained were not possible save to a learning that has become a rite.

Germany's example has become a warning to the world. The classics have other uses to serve than those of German philologie. Psychology is something more than a minute tabulation of the infinitely complex traits of human beings; religion is something other than a curious chapter in the natural history of man; duty or justice is not "a lofty Presence transcending all considerations of expediency." International law is more than a body of historic documents; history is not a record of chauvinistic triumphs, while philosophy is something other than the march of God to Prussia. An academic system that allowed such attitudes to be engendered, such convictions to be formed as those which have characterized the intellectuals of Germany in the last half dozen years did not consult, employ, or comprehend the wisdom of the ages or the experience of mankind. German higher education, therefore, has to be explained. That devotion to learning could have led to such a result is unthinkable. The result is there. It could not have been anything but a camouflage of learning which produced it, and if that method of