Teach how to think, not what to think
Professional military schools should not go overboard in interpreting the SecDef’s anti-DEI memo.
Paula Thornhill | February 11, 2025 04:11 PM ET
“The U.S. Service Academies and other defense academic institutions shall teach that America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered late last month. Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear what the secretary meant by this.
The order appears in a Jan. 29 memo that is largely devoted to eradicating the Pentagon’s diversity-equity-inclusion efforts. In their eagerness to comply, some agencies have broadly interpreted this mandate. The Air Force, for example, temporarily took down historical accounts of the Tuskegee Airmen and Women Airforce Service Pilots, while the National Security Agency is reported to be indiscriminately deleting “DEI-related” words, many of which have specific intelligence-related meanings.
Professional military education schools might respond in similar fashion, stripping curricula of sources and material that present a putatively unauthorized perspective. This could lead to the teaching of what Michael Howard, the past century’s preeminent historian of war, called “nursery history”: a “selective and heroic view of the past” designed to “create or sustain certain emotions or beliefs” rather than foster a deeper understanding. Nursery history reduces competitors and enemies to caricatures, and complex national problems to sloganeering and sound bites.
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2025/02/teach-how-think-not-what-think/402923/?oref=d1-featured-river-secondary
