education for the culture of war

Education for the culture of war
(Coordinator Comment)

Military education has a long and impressive history. Military education in the West is seen as an unbroken chain of history going back to Alexander the Great. Similarly, it is said that Mao Tse Tung was an avid reader of Sun-zi's Art of War, from 2500 years ago.

The military education of officers is reserved for a small elite group of men, although in recent years a few women have been admitted in some countries, with results that have been problematic.

Modern education systems, aside from military education, are formally or informally divided into schools for the elite and schools for ordinary people. Each country has its elite schools, such as Yale and Harvard in the U.S., Oxford and Cambridge in the U.K., the Grandes Écoles in France, etc. Traditionally they were limited to men, and only recently have women been admitted. Elite schools are historically linked to the ruling class and the culture of war and they prepare their students to function in the ruling class.

Ordinary schooling is designed to prepare youth to function well within a culture of war by working obediently within an authoritarian society. An especially insightful critique is that of the Brazilian literacy teacher, Paulo Freire (1968) in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, who calls it the "banking concept of education." Freire says that "The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students' creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed."