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WAR and EDUCATION: Guns vs. Books
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Investing
in Education
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| On Getting Older | |
| Psychoactive Substances |
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from La Opinion, September 22, 2002] It was a Nazi propagandist who said it. That, of course, makes it wrong. “We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter but with guns,” was Joseph Goebbels oft-paraphrased 1936 comment. Perhaps the Nazis really knew – that’s why they burned the books? Perhaps they well understood that the actual choices most politicians make when contemplating war is not guns vs. butter. Rather, it’s guns vs. books. It’s weapons vs. ideas. It’s death and destruction vs. innovation. War and education have always been inextricably interconnected in a zero-sum sort of struggle. Some 2500 years ago, informed by centuries of local Chinese warfare, Sun-tzu wrote, “Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.” The master militarist placed a much higher value on the brains of the commander than the ferocity of the troops. The fundamental lesson of his Art of War was that enough knowledge of the enemy precludes the battle itself. Through the centuries many have commented on the relative power of the pen over the sword. Apparently, only Cervantes’ pathetic Panza missed the point(s), “Let none presume to tell me that the pen is preferable to the sword.” In the 1600s British philosopher John Locke produced several seminal sentiments. For example, he argued eloquently for both scientific empiricism and governments that serve people rather than vice-versa. But, most pertinent to this essay were his comments about national defense. Locke reasoned, “The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.” Most conservatives don’t actually read Adam Smith’s 1776 The Wealth of Nations. They just misquote it. Granted it is a bear of a book to wrestle, but one worth the scratches and abrasions. Smith concludes that education is key. It makes possible not only the division of labor, but also civilization (a.k.a. peace) itself. Indeed, Smith reports that governments should properly spend money on four things – national defense, public schools, infrastructure (roads, canals, etc.), and “the dignity of the chief magistrate.” Thank goodness Mr. Clinton’s term ended shortly after the intern scandal broke. Defense? Schools? Recovering his dignity would surely have consumed the budget surpluses of the time. My employer, the University of California, produces not only wonderful ideas and innovations, but also horrific weapons of mass destruction. The atomic bomb was designed and built at our Los Alamos laboratories in the soft pine forests near Santa Fe. Others’ applications often haunt the innovators. One might debate the reasoning behind the draft deferments of the late1960s allowing my generation to finish our college educations. One would hope such policies demonstrated a preference for books over guns. However, the deferments also served to save, disproportionately, nineteen-year-old white men from jungle deaths. Paul Kennedy’s 1987 tome, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, clearly demonstrates the causal relationship between military spending and declining innovations. He shows how military adventurism ultimately brought down all the great empires of the last 500 years. Comparing our current bellicosity and burgeoning budgets to Kennedy’s notions portends poorly for our nation. William Bennett, in this 1996 book, Body Count, argues for militarily escalating the war on drugs. Interestingly, he reports and then ignores a study completed by Rand Corporation that finds a dollar spent on treatment (a.k.a. educating people how to fight their personal addictions) is worth seven spent on police and military interdiction. This last fall producer Aaron Sorkin opined through Martin Sheen, our TV President, “Education is the silver bullet. It fixes everything – poverty, crime, hate and prejudice, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, everything!” Intended or not, Sorkin’s munitions metaphor concisely juxtaposed weapons and schools. The UC Irvine Graduate School of Management advertises its MBA programs in the local papers including this one. Above one of our ads last month appeared a new competitor. The CIA was looking for a “Middle-Eastern Specialist” or two, folks that speak Arabic, Dari/Pashto, Farsi, or Urdu. Foreign languages are important in international business and in espionage, too. Apparently the folks in Washington DC have been reading Sun-tzu and John Locke lately. Too bad they didn’t before 9/11. The headlines about the “evil axis” and Colombia and the Afghanistan are frightening. Americans will continue dying. Very unsettling in a different way though, is a recent report published by the Educational Testing Service. The title summarizes the findings – The Twin Challenges of Mediocrity and Inequality: Literacy in the U.S. from an International Perspective. Among nineteen high-income countries American high schoolers scored last in educational achievement. Worse still, is the reported bifurcation of achievement among Americans. The latter implies that the United States is being divided by its own declining educational system. We need to support our troops currently in the field. That’s clear. However, our overall military spending is ruining the country. Rather than spending $400 billion a year on high-tech weapons and walls, we need to revitalize our educational system with new investments at local, state, AND federal levels. Real classrooms, not portables, higher pay for teachers, and a longer school year will make this country and the world a safer place in the long run. The math is elementary – in order to invest more in books we have to spend less on guns. |
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