Education is War: The Constitution of Postindustrial Learning

The central thesis of this book is that war and militarism have been formative in the development of Western education from its inception in Classical Greece until the present. The secondary thesis is that the formative influence of warfare on education and on society more generally was neglected by the AngloAmerican academy during the twentieth century. This is not to suggest that twentieth century AngloAmerican scholarship and research was not war related. Rather, it is to suggest that the theoretical and critical study of the formative role of warfare was neglected in inverse proportion to the academic effort devoted to war during that century. The author posits that this critical and theoretical avoidance was a function of the confluence of material conditions, the Cold War for instance, with the academic perception of society as generally peaceful, a perception largely based on the influence of Marx and Spencer. This neglect is compared to the formative role assigned to warfare in the early twentieth century German academy, to war as a theme central to twentieth century American literature, and to the focus on war in French poststructural theory.