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Part I
Background
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Chapter 1
The Military and Public Education: An Overview
The question of military influence on American precollege public education has received so little attention from educational historians, as contrasted, for example, with corporate influence, that the very plausibility of this investigation appears to require a defense. This overview is in two sections. The first section establishes the plausibility of the claim of a military influence on the schools by discussing institutional connections, indirect and direct, between the military and public education, which have been documented by other authors. The second section, more closely tied to this book, identifies scattered references within the secondary educational literature to military influences on specific elements of educational technology, educational research, and educational practice.
A Military Influence on Schools? Establishing the Plausibility of the Claim
This section is divided into two main parts. The first part discusses a powerful indirect source of military influence on the schools: an economy based on a militarized apparatus of science and technology. The second part addresses two kinds of direct military influence on the schools that have received some attention in the educational literature: the use of the schools for military training, and a preparedness ideology characteristic of postwar educational reforms.
Indirect Military Influence on the Schools: An Economy Based on a Militarized Apparatus of Science and Technology
The close connection between education and the economic well-being of the nation has been a recurring theme in late twentieth century American education, surely since the work of the economist Theodore Schultz encouraged policymakers to view education as an investment (Schultz, 1963). This tie between education and economic competitiveness has recently become a rallying cry of policymakers, echoed in a deluge of recent committee reports, among them the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy's A Nation Prepared (1986), the Committee on Economic Development's Investing in Our Children (1986), and the Business-Higher Education Forum's American Potential: The Human Dimension (1988). 'Human resources' that can 'problem-solve' and 'work smart' have become the new desired outputs of an education system geared to a high technology, post-industrial economy. In the words of Nobel economist Herbert A. Simon (1964, p. 71), 'our productive wealth is to be found in the skills stored in men's minds.'
Because of this growing rhetorical link between education and economic prosperity in advanced technological society, it is important to recognize the extent to which military prerogatives determine technological advances fueling national economic policy. To the extent that educational objectives are increasingly being defined by 'high technology' economic policy, then military prerogatives, if only indirectly, can be said to determine education policy as well.
Over two decades ago, sociologist Daniel Bell (1967, p. 165), early architect of post-industrialism, declared that 'military technology [is now] the major determinant of social structure.' The military contribution to scientific research and technological development has in fact become so significant in the United States since World War II that Melman (1985, p. 72) asserts that '"sophisticated technology" [is] the code word for military-sponsored work.'
Lewis Mumford (1934) was among the first historians to note the ongoing 'alliance of mechanization and militarization,' in Technics and Civilization. Mumford wrote then that 'the army...presided over the birth of the modern forms of the machine' (quoted in Smith, 1985, p. 31). Forty years later, Mumford (1970) reemphasized 'the murky air of the battlefield and the arsenal [that] blew over the entire field of industrial invention.'
More recently Merritt Roe Smith (1985) has compiled the work of scholars whose research on technological innovation has revealed 'an important military presence'. Included within this scholarship is David Hounshell's (1984) work on the military origins of interchangeable manufacturing, and David Noble's (1984) history of the Air Force development of numerical control machine tools. Smith (p. 4) cites, within a list that 'can be greatly extended', a sample of some of the best-known industrial products of military enterprise since World War II, including 'computers, sonar, radar, jet engines, swept-wing aircraft, insecticides, transistors, fire-and weather-resistant clothing, high-speed integrated circuits, [and] nuclear power'. Smith notes that, in addition to these inventions, 'the military demand for arms and munitions [has] exerted an enormous influence on the development of mining, metallurgy and machine production,' and that the development of railroad and aerospace technology have been 'closely tied to military enterprise'.
In their Computers in Battle, Gary Chapman and David Benin (1987) have compiled articles that trace the pervasive military sponsorship, in pursuit of 'autonomous weapons', of the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence. These authors discuss in particular the ongoing work of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has been the primary sponsor of research in these fields since its establishment in 1958. According to Clark Thomborson (1987, p. 283), 'computer science is not a branch of military science, yet 70 per cent of all academic research in computer science is funded by the Department of Defense.'
Such military presence is not limited to computer fields. Krinsky (1988, p. 42) notes that the DoD is 'now the most active federal agency in biological science', exceeding the funding by the National Institutes of Health. The historical analysis of electrical engineering development by Carl Barus (1986, p. 41) concludes that 'military perspectives have dominated the electrical engineering undergraduate curriculum since World War II.' Paul Edwards (1985) in his Technologies of the Mind, traces the field of cognitive psychology to its roots in World War II psychoacoustic and cybernetic research. And Robins and Webster (1989, p. 243), noting the military development of the entire field of electronics, remark that '[if] electronics is what war is all about,...war is [also] what electronics is all about.' None of this should be surprising, since a dominant military presence can be seen in the histories of major science and technology funding agencies that emerged after World War II, such as the Office of Naval Research, the RAND Corporation, the National Science Foundation and the Atomic Energy Commission. The founding of these agencies for the expressed purpose of continuing World War II research efforts under the control of wartime researchers has been traced in such works as Daniel Kevles' (1978) study of postwar physicists and Daniel Greenberg's (1967) history of postwar scientific research institutions. The establishment of these agencies set the stage for what C. Wright Mills (1959) originally called the 'militarization of science'.
It is also becoming clear that recent 'high technology' developments in bioengineering and information sciences are steeped in military enterprise. Tirman's (1984) collection of articles, The Militarization of High Technology, and Pillar and Yamamoto's (1988) Gene Wars: Military Control Over the New Genetic Technologies are two recent books documenting this connection. Most recently, an article in the New York Times (Pollack, 1989) suggests that DARPA is 'America's answer to Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI)'. By funding and shaping joint technological ventures within industry, this small but well-endowed military agency is serving directly the interests of US industrial competitiveness. Already DARPA has sponsored major industrial research consortia working on superconductivity, neural networks in artificial intelligence, semiconductor technology (Sematech consortium), gallium arsenide chip technology, and high-definition television. Pollack concludes, 'With the nation facing economic and technological challenges as never before, DARPA seems destined to play an important role in the future' (p. 8).
Public education — and certainly higher education at research universities — is to a large extent being defined in terms of its contribution to these well-funded technological agendas, and it is in turn being shaped by them. To the extent that public education has become a conduit for the production of engineers and technicians and for the production of a 'technologically literate' population, it has become a corollary of military enterprise. The emphasis on science and mathematics education in the schools since Sputnik in the late 1950s is perhaps the most visible consequence of military technological enterprise, which has gradually reshaped the American workplace and the perceived requirements of the workforce.
Attempts to align education to changes in industrialization and technological innovation are not new to postwar America. American educators from Dewey to the present have emphasized the need for education to address the changing needs of a society driven by technological development (Dewey, 1916; Counts, 1929; Wirth, 1972). Others have championed the drive to apply technology to the educational process, to 'modernize' education, in order to ensure its viability in an increasingly technological world (Pressey, 1960b; Woodring, 1970; Useem, 1986). What has been missing in such reforms and exhortations is the realization that technological change is contingent, not inevitable, and that it flows primarily from the initiatives of military enterprise.
Education is increasingly being viewed in terms of its contribution to the viability of the American economy, and particularly to the efficient and productive utilization of the technological apparatus that is the centerpiece of that economy; thus, the military prerogatives shaping economic and technological policy are indirectly shaping educational policy as well. It is not at all implausible, therefore, to suggest that a strong military influence exists between military prerogatives and the contours of late twentieth century public education in America. I turn now to two more direct military influences on the schools that have been discussed in the secondary education literature.
Two Direct Military Influences on Schools
Most discussions of military influence on the public schools found in educational scholarship are concerned with two phenomena: the military use of schools and colleges during and immediately after wartime periods, and a military ideology of preparedness that has informed the direction of public school reform since World War II.
The military use of schools and colleges
Schools and universities in America have been used for military purposes both in times of war and in times of peace. During wartime, public schools have repeatedly mobilized themselves for the war effort. Such military uses of the public schools during World War I and World War II are discussed by Todd (1945) and Kandel (1948), respectively, who address such issues as the restructuring of curricula towards 'stimulating patriotism' and student service in the war effort, towards the accelerated preparation of enlistment-age boys in military-related subjects, and towards actual on-site military training in the schools.
Such efforts have rarely been discontinued at war's end. For example, following both world wars there were campaigns to use the public schools as sites for 'universal military training'. David Noble (1977) discusses such a campaign after World War I, which was led by a small coterie of wartime training leaders. According to Noble, 'the war had shown them the great potential for education-reform work under the influence of military training and discipline' (p. 224). A similar campaign immediately following World War II led a group of progressive educators, among them John Dewey, to warn of...
