Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, James Lang, an English professor at Assumption College in nearby Worcester, Massachusetts, poses a question that ought to intrigue any teacher: what do we want our graduates to remember from our courses twenty years from now? Along his way Professor Lang quotes a biology professor who ventures a prophecy that ought to leave us disconsolate: “Everything I learned as an undergraduate, 25 years ago, is out of date. The same will be true for my students in 25 years.”
Whoa.
Happily, this is a false prophecy. Or rather it’s true on one level and false on a higher and more profound level. It’s certainly true that the natural sciences and engineering change around us every day. Researchers unearth new facts about the natural world and concoct theories to interpret them, software developers formulate and update their products, aerospace engineers hunt for ways to make aircraft more aerodynamic and thus swifter and more economical to operate, and on and on. Inductive learning—surveying what we see around us and formulating ideas about it—does reach its sell-by date with disturbing speed nowadays.
In that sense knowledge is indeed perishable. And yet the principles, process, and habits of mind that go into scientific discovery and technical innovation endure. These higher-order functions are what graduates in scientific, technical, and mathematical disciplines should retain twenty and more years into their careers—which is why one can read the greats of scientific inquiry with profit long after they go to their reward. For example, the works of Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Richard Feynman remain almost as fresh as the day they appeared decades ago.
Let’s import this debate into the realm of professional military education. What should a Naval War College graduate retain twenty years after departing Newport? Well, twenty years after graduation NWC graduates will either have aged out of the force—generally speaking, our students have at least ten years in uniform by the time they show up in Newport, while captains and colonels have to retire at thirty years unless selected for flag rank—or they will have ascended to the highest echelons of military service.
Admirals, generals, or civilians, my answer remains much the same: they should have learned and retained the techniques and above all the habit of strategic thought. Hardware will have moved on, much as it has moved on in the twenty-odd years since I took off the uniform for the last time. Back then, for instance, stealth aircraft were awkward-looking, angular contraptions operated by the U.S. Air Force; today their descendants perch on ships at sea. Gizmos change with breakneck velocity, as do the tactics military folk devise to employ them in action.
But the strategic habit of mind is not transient—and it applies both within the politico-military domain and beyond. In my home department in Newport, the Strategy & Policy Department, we inculcate that habit of mind by reading the masters of strategic theory—the Clausewitzes, Sun Tzus, and Mao Zedongs—and then using their ideas to judge how well or poorly combatants fared during historical epochs wracked by armed conflict. The youngster among them is Mao, who did most of his writing in the 1920s and 1930s and has been dead for over forty years. These are ideas imbued with permanent value.
My adopted department for this fall term, the National Security Affairs Department, takes a far more contemporary approach to strategic matters. And yet we still invoke ideas articulated years or decades ago even though the times move on. Henry Kissinger’s or Thomas Schelling’s notions of coercion and deterrence still resonate over fifty years after they were published. Joseph Nye’s concept of “soft power” remains a hardy perennial the better part of two decades after he started fashioning it. Etc. Some big ideas have staying power from generation to generation.
Lang’s question is plainly a great conversation starter. It compels teachers to cast eyes well into the future, and to sift between permanent and more transitory things in the curriculum they teach. Both are essential; few biology or strategy professors would argue that we shouldn’t teach about the state of our field as it exists today. But at the same time we need to ensure that students walk out of our classrooms bearing the intellectual toolkit they need to keep up as the world changes around us—as it will. That’s where the masters of science and strategy render good service across the decades and centuries.
