The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of HistoryPartridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Philosophy
The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of History
Partridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Education; History -- Philosophy; War
There appears to be a pedagogical lesson in the contrast between the
heroic and the moral view of teaching war and peace illustrated by the
German philosophy of war and the ideal of the Boy Scout organization.
Deducting something for literary exaggeration, we may say that
education cannot afford to neglect either of these attitudes, but must
indeed in some way combine them. The exaggeration consists on one side
in praising the specific act of war; but on the other side there is
plainly lacking something of the dramatic appeal which any ideal life
for the young must have. War is an evil, but the spirit that makes war
is by no means an evil. The philosophy of war proves its failure by
ignoring the moral ideal altogether, or regarding morality as
something solely national, but the other, it may be, puts the moral
ideal in a pedagogically impossible position. Both the content and the
form must be taken into account in any educational plan that hopes to
exert power or to be influential in any important way now, and it is
the form which, more than anything else, is still lacking in our whole
procedure of education.
_Preparedness and Military Training_
Military training has now of course become a practical question with
us and with every nation. It is the military use of military education
that must first of all be considered. For that reason it must
primarily be a problem upon which political authorities and military
experts must decide. These experts must be competent to tell us what
military equipment is necessary at any time to meet the requirements
of our political situation, and they must be able to advise about the
amount and kind of actual military training necessary to make this
physical equipment most effective. All this, plainly, must be provided
whether it be good or bad from a general educational standpoint. But
preparedness and national defense mean, of course, more than the
possession of guns and more than military training as such. And there
can be no hard and fast line between military preparedness and the
wider technical preparedness in which all the equipment and skill of
scientific and mechanical activities of the country are always ready
to be mobilized in the defense of it; or between these and the still
more general preparedness through the organization and control of the
human factor in ways that are not specifically military or
mechanically technical at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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