Less than a year ago, Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer published Education for Seapower (E4S) and issued an action memo laying a course for the reform and improvement of naval education across the Navy and Marine Corps. The first major step from that effort occurred in September, when John Kroger was sworn in as the Navy Department’s first chief learning officer. As Kroger and his staff begin to develop a strategy for naval education across the department, the history of naval education reform is an area ripe for examination. In particular, the General Prize Essay Contest of 1879, the Naval Institute’s first-ever essay contest, provides some important insights that can contribute to the Navy and Marine Corps’ 21st-century strategy for educating the officer corps.
Examining 19th-Century Naval Education
In January 1879, ten officers submitted essays for the first Naval Institute essay contest. The judges—who included one senior line officer, a senior engineering officer, and Charles W. Elliot, the president of Harvard College—took three months to read and discuss their favorites. In their formal decision submission, they commented, “The competition for the prize offered by the Naval Institute has evidently been an animated one and has called forth a credible amount of strenuous exertion.”
The winner was Lieutenant Commander Allan D. Brown, an 1863 graduate of the Naval Academy who had served as a junior officer in the Civil War on board the steam auxiliary sloop-of-war Iroquois. In the early 1870s he had taken up his pen and begun engaging with his profession through writing, publishing articles in Harper’s Magazine on naval architecture and the early history of the U.S. Naval Academy. After his Navy career, he went on to become president of Norwich, the military college in Vermont.
Brown’s essay began by acknowledging the huge change in naval culture that came with the founding of the U.S. Naval Academy in 1845. The introduction of schoolhouse-based learning, which brought a dedication to education in addition to practical training, was a cultural leap forward. For the most part, Brown did not address the details of the Academy’s curriculum; however, without using the phrase, he advocated for a course of liberal arts studies that would balance education in technical fields with the humanities and understanding of the wider world. In particular, Brown suggested that nascent naval officers needed to understand how to use the technology they would face in the fleet, though they did not need to know how to design and build that technology themselves. A balanced education would prepare officers with the baseline knowledge and intellectual habits that one day would be necessary for command.
Yet, according to Brown, a liberal arts education was just the foundation to be built on. The key reform he suggested in his essay was the introduction of graduate-level naval education. Up to 1879, there was no effort to educate officers beyond their commissioning. It was assumed that all subsequent learning would come through on-the-job training and practical experience. But as technology advanced through the 19th century, Brown saw that the basic and wide course of study that was proper at Annapolis was insufficient for the span of an entire career. He called for a technical-based graduate education that would lead to the specialization necessary for the administration of the Navy and the design and construction of its ships and weapons.
The second-place finisher in the essay contest was Lieutenant Commander Caspar Goodrich. Goodrich was a year junior to Brown and had served on a series of deployed ships during and after the war. In 1871 he reported to the Naval Academy to teach physics and chemistry before returning to the fleet in 1874. Goodrich wrote that his paper’s effort was “to ascertain what modifications, if any, are necessary to make our system of education result in personnel of maximum elasticity and efficiency,” and he warned education reformers to be wary “of the fogs of prejudice and tradition.”
Goodrich argued that developing and educating naval officers worked hand-in-hand with educating and training of the enlisted force. For officers, he saw an educational system made up of three components:
- The education of a midshipman for commissioning
- Experience and wardroom-based learning in the fleet to demonstrate the practical side of the profession
- Graduate-level education to develop specialized knowledge necessary for running the upper levels of the Navy
To have an efficient and effective officer corps, career planning had to balance the necessity of practical fleet experience with the requirement for specialized education, he wrote.
The two lieutenant commanders were in rough agreement on the majority of their suggestions. Goodrich believed the knowledge needed for the design or construction of weapons should wait until graduate-level work, after officers had gained fleet experience. After promotion to lieutenant and having their “professional taste established,” officers then could decide how they wanted to specialize, whether in weapons development, ship design, logistics and finance, or strategy and operations. Goodrich was more specific—and ambitious—calling for a “Naval College” to teach two rounds of graduate-level education. The first would occur at the end of the lieutenant years and focus on technical subjects, and the second would be just prior to promotion to commander, with a broader focus on international affairs, law, and decision-making, subjects that today we think of as naval strategy.
Third place in the General Prize Essay Contest went to a 39-year-old commander named Alfred Thayer Mahan. To that point, Mahan already had been involved in naval education. At the end of the Civil War he served as a seamanship and navigation instructor at the Naval Academy, working for then-Lieutenant Commander Stephen Luce. In the mid-1870s, he returned to Annapolis to become head of the Gunnery Department. Soon after his arrival, Mahan was elected president of the new Naval Institute. His essay was his first published work in what would become a long career thinking and writing about naval affairs.
Mahan was in general agreement on the need for a balanced undergraduate education and an educational progression throughout a career. But as a member of the faculty at Annapolis, he was far more specific about areas of the commissioning curriculum that could be improved. He advocated for reducing the engineering and technical classes in favor of more classes in the humanities, languages, and history and tactics, pointing out that naval officers needed to understand human dynamics and world affairs as much if not more than the creation and design of new technology. “I confess to a feeling of mingled impatience and bitterness when I hear the noble duties and requirements of a naval officer’s career ignored, and an attempt made to substitute for them the wholly different aims and faculties of the servant of science,” he wrote.
The comment and discussion session following the reading of Brown’s prize-winning paper was just as vibrant as the essays themselves. Chaired by J. Russell Soley, a history and government professor at Annapolis who would go on to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the discussion was transcribed and printed by the Naval Institute in Proceedings. It is a fascinating look at a discussion that included remarks from an admiral, warrant officers, engineers, and line officers. A debate developed over whether line officers could be expected, or should be expected, to master the design of their systems or just focus on their employment. There also was general agreement on the need for graduate-level education for an officer, but there was wide disagreement on where and when that education should take place within a career. As can be expected, there also was heavy debate over any possible change to the Naval Academy curriculum.
Questions from the Past
The three essays and the discussion transcript offer a historical perspective for today’s discussions of naval education reform. Two issues raised in the 1879 contest are just as relevant today as they were in the second half of the 19th century. They provide important starting points for today’s reform efforts.
This first is how education fits in a naval officer career. Brown and Goodrich both saw graduate education as a future requirement for promotion and command, just as undergraduate education was required for commissioning. But rather than leaving officers to figure out on their own how to meet the requirement, they discussed when an officer should be sent to school and how that time away from the fleet should fit into a career. These 19th-century essayists believed in sending officers to school, so they could give full attention to their learning and the professional development that came with it.
Many of today’s suggestions for improving education, however, seem to focus on shoehorning it into an officer or noncommissioned officer’s life via distance learning. Many still refuse to acknowledge that education is best conducted as a full-time endeavor. The majority of today’s officers complete professional military education (PME) through distance schooling during their own personal and family time. They often end up with little more than a “check the block” education that has only a tenuous connection to or value for their actual fleet positions. Not only is this bad for learning and for optimizing the educational experience, but it also places additional stressors on a force and on families. To most officers, this suggests that the Navy and Marine Corps do not truly care about or value learning, because if they did, they would provide the time in a career to do it right.
The second issue is how education integrates with a naval career, not in timing, but in content. Mahan, Brown, and Goodrich all wrote about what officers needed to be learning and how the sequence of undergraduate and graduate education should fit together as an integrated whole. This included the subjects studied, the types of information—whether technical or humanities and social science based—to be covered, and the depth and detail of the content. Brown suggested education for officers should aspire to prepare them for the bigger issues and more complex challenges that come with gaining seniority. Goodrich and Mahan noted that the fleet already was set up to deliver the training needed to learn and comply with procedures and regular administrative tasks.
In the 21st century, a new view of naval education also must address what kinds of knowledge are important for the naval officer of the present and future and how the different delivery methods integrate to produce “well educated” officers. The goal should be preparing officers for future responsibility, not just the tasks of the next set of orders. If the junior PME courses are delivering basically the same knowledge and skills as the senior PME course, that is not well integrated or a good way to maximize the preparation of senior officers. Likewise, personnel systems that do not track officers’ education or account for it in how they are detailed or what jobs are available for them quickly negate the value of that education.
How education fits into the timing of a Navy or Marine Corps career was a question in 1879, and it remains a question today. The details are different, what a traditional career path looks like has changed, and the rise of the warfare tribes has wrested control of those career paths. But when to send an officer to school remains a central issue. Likewise, how the content, skills, and knowledge learned across a career fit together with practical fleet or staff experiences in a holistic way is a question that transcends the decades. Staffs and personnel systems of the 21st century work differently from what Brown, Goodrich, and Mahan experienced; however, integration is no less important for today’s effort to reform the Sea Services and education.
Kroger and his staff have a daunting task ahead of them as they construct an education strategy for the Department of the Navy. It is surely true that the details of the challenges and adversaries faced by today’s Sea Services are different from those of Brown, Goodrich, and Mahan’s time. But looking at the past and understanding the efforts of prior generations of officers can assist our search for the fundamental questions to ask today.