Explaining his conception of the nature of education in Book One of The Laws, Plato observes, “ . . . when we speak in terms of praise or blame about the bringing-up of each person, we call one man educated and another uneducated, although the uneducated man may be sometimes very well educated for the calling of a retail trader, or of a captain of a ship, and the like.” One who has been trained to be only a retail trader or a ship captain, Plato goes on, has received a training that is “mean and illiberal and is not worthy to be called education at all.”
Had there been an Athenian Naval Academy, Plato might have given consideration to the dilemma that confronts an institution of this sort. Should such an academy, which has as its purpose the formation of captains of ships, provide occupational training or should it educate? Should it attempt to do both? Can it do both?
Those who speak of the United States Naval Academy as a trade school have a ready answer to these questions. We do not refer here to the Academy’s critics who mistakenly consider it to be a trade school and use the expression as a term of opprobrium. Rather we have in mind a group which we find much harder to put up with—those friends of the Academy who insist that it ought to be a trade school and glory in its undeserved reputation as such. The creed of this group is summarized in the formula, “All we want to do is produce naval officers.” From this premise it is inferred that the Academy’s curriculum ought to be limited to certain technical and professional subjects. The inclusion of anything supererogatory is at best distracting and at worst is likely to frustrate the attainment of our primary goal.
Couched in the language of hard common sense, this point of view has a deceptive appeal. It sounds like a summons to return to a basic mission which is slipping from our grasp as we pursue some will-of-the-wisp. But neither the fundamental premise nor the inference derived from it is true. The goal at which we ought to aim and at which we, in fact, do aim is more than the production of naval officers. As for the inference that our curriculum should provide more specialized training and less education, we must reject it because a program constructed on such lines would yield less competent naval officers.
I submit that the young men whom we are trying to educate are going to be more than naval officers. They are—and after receiving Commissions, will continue to be—human beings and citizens. Any schooling which aims solely at drawing out occupational skills and implanting the knowledge needed for performing occupational duties, is, as Plato asserts, unworthy to be called education, and is consequently unworthy of man. However desirable and necessary vocational training may be, it is not an adequate substitute for education of the whole man and ought not to obscure the need for such education. Perhaps the chief objection to vocational training is that it neglects man’s primary vocation, being human. To this job, being doctor, lawyer, plumber, or naval officer should be secondary and subsidiary. Man’s second vocation is that of being a citizen, of acting in concert with other men for the attainment of the common good. Education, aiming at the development of the whole man, must be directed toward both these facets of human nature.
These considerations have a direct bearing on the content of the curriculum. Without essaying a complete treatment of the implications for the educator in these theses that man is a person and that he is a political animal, we can suggest a few general conclusions to which they conduct us. Above all, they demand that attention be given to certain perennial problems of concern to all men, the problems of philosophy—the what, the whence, the whither, the why of human existence. Such riddles concern us not because we learn to build a better mousetrap or devise a defense against Snorkel by solving them but only because we can thereby learn to live better.
There is no department of philosophy at the Naval Academy; no courses listed as metaphysics or ethics appear in its catalogue. Yet we bump into philosophical questions as we invade many fields of knowledge, especially in courses in history, literature, government, and economics. Men cannot study the deeds of a Bonaparte, a Lincoln, a Roosevelt, a Hitler, cannot read a decision of the Supreme Court, cannot scan a table of income distribution, cannot read of Faust’s bargain with Mephistopheles without becoming philosophers. These things raise questions in the mind that will not be suppressed. Do those deeds conform to the ideal pattern of human behavior? Is the economic system working to give a fair share of goods to all? Such questions are the beginning of the quest for ethical standards: How ought men to act? What makes deeds good or bad? How should economic goods be distributed? And ethical problems push the inquirer into metaphysics: What is man? What is his relationship to other men? to the universe? to God?
As a citizen, man needs a philosophy of government, an understanding of the ends and means of divergent systems of government, particularly of the political system under which he lives. In a democracy in which the responsibility of governing rests upon all the citizens to some degree, this knowledge is far more necessary than in a system in which responsibility has been surrendered along with rights to a dictator. The social sciences and history arc indispensable to the formation of both man and citizen, acquainting the student with the institutions and the mores which help to make him what he is.
If all that has been said in the foregoing paragraphs is dismissed as rubbish and it is insisted that the task of the Naval Academy is solely that of training the naval officer in the man, the conclusion does not follow that the task can be accomplished by a narrow training limited to a few fields of specialized knowledge and confined to developing a small range of skills. On the contrary, the nature of the naval officer’s job oilers a potent argument for giving midshipmen an education that is broad and basic.
The tide of professional and vocational specialization seems to be on the ebb in our schools. But, even at its apogee, its most ardent advocates recognized the desirability of schooling those preparing for certain professions in a broad area of knowledge. Such a formation was justified for the lawyer, for example, because knowledge of things like logic, economics, or mathematics would make him a better lawyer, Now if it is conceded that general, rather than specialized education is necessary or desirable for the making of a good lawyer, a similar type of education can be justified on vocational and utilitarian grounds for the naval officer.
The argument used to justify liberal education as preparation for the law would run something like this. The lawyer’s work leads him into many widely dissimilar fields running from accounting to zoology. Adequate preparation for the law, then, must include familiarization with the principal fields of knowledge outside the law. Further, since much will be neglected, an important object of pre-legal education will be the training of the individual’s analytical and critical faculties, a sharpening of the tools by which the lawyer can later make his own way into unexplored fields.
By a parallel line of reasoning it can be urged that a program of specialized training is not enough to guarantee a superior type of naval officer. Vocational training is all that is needed for those occupations in which one is called upon to perform a small number of relatively simple operations involving only a few skills and a limited area of knowledge. A plumber or a bricklayer who will be equal to the demands of his occupation needs no more than purely vocational training. We determine the content of Ids training in the light of what he will be called upon to do. When we turn to an analysis of what the naval officer is called upon to do, we encounter a variety of jobs which involve an infinite range of heterogeneous skills and which require some familiarity with the most diverse fields of knowledge.
The midshipmen whom we educate will be budget officers, fiscal officers, statisticians, legal officers, insurance and bond salesmen, advisers on personal finance, pilots, censors, cryptanalysts, bombardiers, hydrographers, linguists, hotel managers, navigators, civil governors, ordnance officers, personnel consultants, journalists, engineers of all types, auditors, radar officers, educators, boss stevedores, air conditioners, firemen, policemen, accountants, gunnery officers, chemists, logisticians, athletic coaches, labor relations experts, communications officers, et cetera. This enumeration, made up of positions in the naval establishment which are filled frequently enough to justify inclusion in BuPers’s Classification of Naval Officers’ Qualifications, is partial, but it is enough to suggest the difficulties facing anyone who would design a program of vocational training for midshipmen. The list above, containing fields of activity which have fairly close counterparts in civilian life, omits positions of command. Omitted, too, are many duties which an officer may expect to perform in the normal course of events and which are none the less real even though Bupers fails explicitly to recognize them. For example, the officer can hardly hope to avoid serving at one time or another as diplomat, strategist, father confessor, orator, and housekeeper. The type of expert knowledge expected of the naval officer at times strains one’s imagination as is evidenced by the request made of BuPers during the war to furnish officers to manage citrus fruit growing in the South Pacific. And expertness in two or more unrelated fields is sometimes demanded. Witness the calls in wartime for French-speaking officers with a knowledge of engineering and Russian-speaking officers with a knowledge of the Soviet wireless system. It is doubtful that any profession or occupation in civilian life demands as varied a fund of knowledge and skills or requires equal versatility of those engaged in it.
If a midshipman could expect to remain in a given field throughout his naval career, the problem of designing a program of specialized training for him from the outset would be somewhat simplified. The policy of rotating the assignments of officers, however, makes it likely that any individual will serve in a variety of positions.
Of course the policy of rotation of duty could be jettisoned, and a major obstacle to specialized training thus removed. But even if specialization is feasible, would it be desirable? In its favor, one might observe that a longer period of specialization beginning with plebe summer might be expected to produce more competent specialists. Yet if all become specialists, who will be equipped to exercise direction over the whole organization? Who will see to it that one specialist cooperates with other types of specialists toward the attainment of a common end? Who will be capable of commanding? In any organization some must perform these roles which call for that breadth of knowledge and that appreciation of central purpose found in the generalist. The specialist, who does not lift his eyes above the horizon of his specialty, is not the man for the job. Those positions in the naval establishment which require the talents of the generalist, we can expect, will be filled mainly by the Academy’s graduates. Education at the Academy must be patterned to meet the specifications of this type of position. Among the qualities most to be desired in those who exercise central direction in any organization arc understanding of the major and final goals pursued by the organization, some familiarity (not necessarily detailed and complete) with the subordinate parts of the organization, and enough general intelligence and human sympathy to get the most out of those who comprise the organization. The problems that will confront the director of any large unit cannot all be anticipated, and no formula of. universal applicability for solving all problems that arise can be devised in advance. Therefore, command or central direction can be effectively handled only by men who are openminded, adaptable, able to analyze, evaluate, and discriminate. These are the intellectual qualities of first importance for the job, and, since education is directed toward the intellect, these are the qualities that the educational program of the Academy must strive always to cultivate.
A fatal defect of the specialist is lack of one of these qualities, adaptability. What happens to the specialist if his specialty becomes obsolete? The Harvard Committee on Education in its report General Education in a Free Society (1946) puts our objection pointedly:
Even from the point of view of economic success, specialism has its own peculiar limitations. Specializing in a vocation makes for inflexibility in a world of fluid possibilities, business demands minds capable of adjusting themselves to varying situations and of managing complex human institutions. Given the pace of economic progress, techniques alter speedily, and even the work in which the student has been trained may no longer be useful when he is ready to earn a living or soon after, (p. 54)
What is true of business is equally true of the Navy, and today it is more true than ever. A new major weapon may revolutionize warfare and make useless a great part of present- day tactics, weapons, and the skills involved in employing them. Atomic warfare may do to many occupational skills in the Naval establishment what the automobile did to the skills of the blacksmith.
One further aspect of the naval officer’s job that provides a powerful argument for a liberal education deserves mention but hardly requires explanation. The unique responsibility of the officer in the armed forces toward his country must be reckoned with in planning the education of one who is to become an officer. Reverting to Plato, we read in The Republic that the warrior ought to possess the qualities of a good watchdog, loyalty and courage. The ideal watchdog must be capable of discriminating between whom to bite and whom to protect. Analogously, the ideal naval officer must understand that which he is protecting. The heritage of which he is in a special sense the trustee must have meaning to him. Those who fail to understand what they are protecting and what they are protecting it against will be unreliable watchdogs. If they fail either to comprehend or to cling fast to the values implicit in that heritage, they arc less efficient as protectors. Our own day offers evidence of the disastrous consequences of failings of military leaders in these respects. Such failings prepared the way for the collapse of France in 1940. Consequently, we argue again for liberal education on the ground that it will make the naval officer better at his job.
Whether midshipmen are regarded as human beings or as no more than naval officers, the conclusion is the same. The Academy must be more than a trade school; it must educate. The Holloway Report of September 15, 1945 to the Secretary of the Navy recognized this necessity, calling for a revision of the curriculum “to give a stronger emphasis to basic and general education.” And the Superintendent’s statement of the mission of the Naval Academy rejects narrow professionalism, asserting that the Academy seeks to provide “a basic education” as well as knowledge of the naval profession, moral, mental, and physical development, and to inculcate “ideals of duty, honor, and loyalty in order that the Naval Service may be provided with graduates who are capable junior officers in whom have been developed the capacity and foundation for future development in mind and character leading toward a readiness to assume the highest responsibilities of citizenship and Government.”
Schooling that aims at these ends is a far cry from what Plato stigmatized as the mean and illiberal training sufficient to produce a skilled captain of a ship. On the contrary, this mission approximates remarkably Plato’s formulation of the purpose of true education—education “which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship and teaches him how rightly to rule and how to obey.”