MAKING WAR-FIGHTERS

(20) The strategic importance of education was recognized long before the robber barons of the US Industrial Revolution however; strategic understanding of the power of compulsory mass (universal) education in Europe coincides with the Christian Reformation. Protestantism, statist militarism and secular education have been closely linked since their inception. Martin Luther in a letter dated 1524, To the Councilmen of all Cities in Germany that they Establish and Maintain Christian Schools (LW 45:341–378):

I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school. . . .If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service to bear the spear and rifle, to mount ramparts, and perform other material duties in time of war, how much more has it a right to compel the people to send their children to school, because in this case we are warring with the devil, whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities and principalities of their strong men.

The Catholic Church answered in spirit if not in kind with the Society of Jesus (Jesuits, 1540). In one way or another education from the West has been at global war since. In the years following the Reformation, religious organizations, Protestant and Catholic, and private (mercantile) companies as the West India Company selectively disseminated (Western) education as an adjunct to their economic and religious activity. Educational expansionism accompanied European global expansionism, in what the French historian Fernand Braudel called “the system of five hundred years.” Education was a multi-purpose tool employed alongside military, economic, political and cultural tools to develop and maintain European (and US) dominance on land and sea, and in air and “space,” from the 16th century until 2008 perhaps, when education power allowed the Chinese military to send up a submarine in the midst of a US naval battle group (2007) and to bring down a satellite in global orbit with a missile (2008).

(21) The originary poets of Western culture, the archetypical Western cultural workers, the forbears of modern historians and poets and scientists, first functioned to chronicle and assist with warfare. Their great stories, retold and revisioned, still hold Western warrior cultures together. Heroic Homeric martial myths (8th. century BCE) still ground the Western cultural imaginary. Herodotus (c.484–425 BCE.) was not only the first “travel writer,” but the “father of history” (Cicero) because of his narratives of the wars between the Greeks and barbarians (Persia—present day Iran). These generative Hellenic narratives, like the generative narratives emanating from Rome and Germanic Europe later, are weapons bred in the bone of Western culture.

(22) Herodotus’ successor Thucydides (460–395 BCE.) is not only considered the Western world’s first realist historian and historian of record for the Peloponnesian Wars (431–404 BCE), but also the first great theorist of war and a practicing military leader. Interested not only in chronicling what he observed, Thucydides was concerned as well with the causes of the Wars between the Hellenes domiciled on the Attic peninsula. For generations Thucydides’ history was considered the foundation of an education proper. His chronicles and speculations formed a primary model for the study of the past in the Western academy that is still on offer in “history” and most any other academic discipline framed by the conventions of mechanical (meaningful, linear) historical movement. These originary myths are inherently martial, carrying with them values that generate and legitimate contemporary warrior culture.

(23) After classical antiquity there may have been a pan-European education system based in the canons of the Church of Rome, or the court of Charlemagne or in Bourbon French hegemony. However it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that education could provide definitive strategic advantage, and then only because of vastly increased agricultural and mechanical production. The development of fullspectrum strategic statist education is coextensive with the development of coal fired steam engines and four crop rotation in Northwest Europe and North America (the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions). By the late nineteenth century, mindscapes were transformed by systems of mass compulsory education just as landscapes were transformed by systems of industrialized material production in newly formed fields and factories.

(24) The Anglophone academy has been loathe to conceptualize education in cultural/material terms whereby education is a strategic industry dedicated to the production of subjectivity. However, notwithstanding this squeamishness, the strategic value of compelled mass elementary and select advanced education, and of continuous knowledge production and continuous operational improvement has been evident politically, economically, culturally and militarily since the midnineteenth century. German “grade” schools, polytechnics, and research universities are exemplars, as is the Kindergarten, a nineteenth century Prussian invention (Friedrich Fröbel). These institutions predate the German industrial revolution considerably however.

(25) Prussia, the state that formed the basis for the German nation and empire, is more responsible than any other for developing contemporary strategic education. Much of the US system, and the systems in many other countries, is based upon the education system the Prussians developed. Even the concept of lifelong learning dates to nineteenth-century Prussia. The constant subjective upgrading and continuous quality improvement that currently is considered novel and progressive was incorporated into the Prussian educational system from the mid-nineteenth century, mostly through vocational upgrading.

(26) Prussia then already conceived of education stretching from cradle to grave, as a continuous flow process; the German industrial revolution, which proceeded quite differently from the more organic revolution in Great Britain, intensified and enlarged the process. Prussia had turned to education as a means to redevelop the state, the military, the economy and the culture a half century before the German industrial revolution. Defeat by Napoleon in 1806 provided the catalyst. The von Humboldt brothers founded the University of Berlin, the world’s first research university, in 1810. The invention and introduction of academic disciplines in the new German research universities allowed for the reorganization of existing knowledge and provided capacious disciplinary structure for the new knowledge that comprised the new disciplines.

(27) This new form of educational institution produced a “fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society,” (Bildung) that was itself a weapons system (i.e. the producer of objective knowledge that was itself a form of global warfare). The Kindergarten, compulsed mass elementary schooling, the revised curriculum in the academic “high” schools (Gymnasium), new vocational schools (the Berlin Polytechnic was founded in 1820), centralized educational governance and the introduction of “lifelong learning” regularized the formation of subjectivity. This amounted to an Education Revolution on a scale with the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions that receive academic recognition and study.

(28) The transformative educational goal set for Germany by Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt was nothing less than the “spiritual and moral training of the nation.” “War is the one of the healthiest phenomena for the cultivation of the human race,” Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote, though he did qualify that statement, “It is the admittedly fearful extreme.” Bildung was the term von Humboldt used to describe the dispositional set ostensibly imparted by this “training.” This elevated concept for the formation of an ideal (bourgeois) type was based in teaching a subject to search out “truth” and relate it to “equality,” the end product being a subject who complements the concept of State as developed by Hegel. Massumi writes (Deleuze and Guatarri, 1987, xii):

The end product would be “a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society”—each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State, Prussian mind meld. More insidious than the well-known practical co-operation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself that “properly spiritual absolute State” endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric.

Hegel developed much of his statist war theory while in the employ of the University of Berlin; Marx and Engels attended. Alumni include 29 Nobel prize winners. Von Braun attended, as did von Neumann, the “father” of contemporary electronically enabled computing. Einstein and Planck attended, as did the German nationalist poets and theorists Heine and Fichte. Von Bismarck, the person most responsible for the unification of Germany, attended, as did the philosophers Schopenhauer and Schelling. The University of Chicago (25 Nobel Laureates in economics alone), founded in 1890 by the American Baptist Education Society and US oilman J.D. Rockefeller, perhaps is the only university extant that emulates the sheer academic power of the University of Berlin before it was dismembered by the USSR after WWII.

(29) Germany provides the paradigmatic example of the use of education strategically, in the nation itself and imperially. The term Kulturkampf (culture war) dates to 1873; it was in large a battle between Bismarck’s Protestant modernists and Catholic conservatives. Bismarck’s Minister of Culture (Education) Adalbert von Falk carried Kulturkampf into East Prussia (much of current Poland) in an effort to force state schooling and secularism on the indigenous Catholic population.

(30) Though this “culture war” was not a complete success, Roman Catholic control of education was much reduced and religiously oriented curriculum was replaced by a secular, nationalist curriculum that emphasized the study of “new subjects” such as German literature and history. Most importantly, the culture war resulted in state control of education (the Jesuit order in Germany was dissolved during the battle and civil marriages instituted). This Protestant statist educational reform was replayed in other industrializing countries as well, including Canada where the dissolution of the country almost resulted (the Manitoba Schools Question of 1892).

(31) The Western monopoly on nationalized industrialized education power was short lived however; the Meji Restoration in Japan imported the French and more notably the German educational model in the early 1870s. Mass compulsory schooling, military conscription and the development of some of the world’s finest research universities, the national University of Tokyo and University of Kyoto notably, were among the radical reforms instituted. A national Ministry of Education was established in 1871, three years after the fall of the shogunate; a law mandating compulsory education followed shortly. Its doubtful if another country could have done so much so quickly; social respect for learning and privilege and national cohesiveness was all important (culture).

(32) Present day Egypt and Turkey tried to break the Western education monopoly decades earlier than Japan. Their developmental efforts were disabused, in spite of progressive administrations devoting considerable resources to educational upgrading. Japan was an anomaly—the only non-European nation to develop formidable industrial, educational and military power during the nineteenth century. It is only very recently, since the 1950s, that education power has become more widely disseminated. As usual however, after the generative developments in preindustrial Germany, education power develops in concert with industrial power, lately in Korea, Singapore, India and China for example.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 780