Education, Attitudes and the Armed Forces: A Cultural-Technological and Comparative Historical Analysis

Abstract

This rather wide-ranging paper considers the cultural and comparative elements in the training of military officers since the European Enlightenment of the 18(superscript th) Century. The entire conception of military training is too often confined to studies of military training institutions, changing legislation, the links between training and military strategies, and perhaps the economics of warfare. These are large issues but they tend to neglect the historical forces impacting upon the training of military officers' that stem from profound socio-cultural and technological changes in the total environment of military institutions and capacities. In this study we argue that officer education has always been dominated, and in all places, by only two essential elements-those of character and those of expertise or special knowledge. Changes in the wider contexts of military institutions have clearly affected the commanding conceptions of character and expertise. What should an officer look like? How should he act? What should he know? Or, what should she know? Our argumentative strategy here is to claim that officer training has historically taken place within 'total institutions' on the basis of social selection and a more-or-less common set of hegemonic values, although these latter may have at times been quite explicitly imposed from above by elite authorities. We further argue that the underlying social, cultural and technological changes of the 20th Century effectively destroyed such conditions and, thereby, threw into question the whole character and purpose of officer education in all nations. As such changes, first stemming from advanced western societies, globalized over that century, so too the military of all nations were ultimately concerned, pulled into the vortex of a new cultural dissolution. All military systems resisted the impact of such cultural or technological revolutions, and in many societies, especially authoritarian communist, nationalist or Islamic societies, there were strong efforts to isolate military academies from their historical contexts. The final part of this article considers the place of Taiwan within this new socio-cultural vortex.