It’s been a slow weekend for blogging; rather than waiting out the season’s first snowstorm by the blaze of a friendly fire in Mead manor, I spent Saturday up at Yale, helping torture this year’s crop of grand strategy students.
The Yale grand strategy seminar was started some years ago by John Gaddis, Paul Kennedy and Charles Hill, and it may be the most unusual course taught in an American college today. Students spend the first semester (which begins in January) reading books by and about great strategists of the past. Over the summer they have internships all over the world which they develop in consultation with the staff. In the fall, teams of students prepare policy briefs on everything from military reform to global warming and public health. The course culminates on two Saturdays in December when the students elect a president, form a government, and try to steer American foreign policy through various devilish crises cooked up by the staff.
It’s an elegantly designed class and I’ve been proud to be a part of it; what makes the course so unusual, however, is less its intellectual design than the educational philosophy behind it: pain is good.
In the not so distant past, pain was a standard tool in the teacher’s curriculum. There was physical pain, as in the paddle with which Mr. Katz kept my seventh grade gym class in line at Guy B. Phillips Junior High School. There was also the much more lacerating pain of ridicule and humiliation, one brought to perfection by the Latin masters at Groton School as they interrogated their thirteen and fourteen year old charges on the intricacies of Latin grammar. “A dative, boy?” they would ask with a threateningly insouciant tone of mock curiosity. “Just what kind of a dative would that be?”
“A dative of reference, sir?” I would say, trying desperately to keep the doubt out of my voice.
“Very interesting,” Mr. Getty might reply. “And could you please tell the class to what this ‘dative’ of yours refers?”
“To the subject of the sentence, sir,” you might venture, clearly guessing — and the grim inquisition continued and your classmates, forgetting for the moment than any one of them would be next on the rack, snickered gleefully while you labored in vain to maintain some shred of dignity as you felt the ground crumbling beneath your feet.
At the time, we accepted this treatment as something normal and inescapable, like the weather; the climate has changed since then and today’s students live in a warmer, more user-friendly world. I’m not sure this is a good thing. Samuel Johnson was once asked whether the teachers in English schools were still as brutal as they had been in his youth. He replied that he thought that the boys were beaten less than formerly, but that on the whole they learned less — so that “what they gained at one end they lost at the other.”
At least metaphorically, the grand strategy class tries to educate its students at both ends. When the students screw up, they know it. As the students present their briefing papers complete with Power Point slides, the faculty pepper them with questions — some substantive, some intended to throw the students off their stride. The questions are rough and relentless; I’m not sure that even Mr. Getty could do it any better.
In the simulations, almost anything goes. The simulation staff role-plays journalists who are almost as destructive and idiotic as they are in real life. At the first scent of blood the howling pack is off to the hunt — yesterday chasing after a student whose Facebook page contained an imprudent characterization of the simulation that cannot be reproduced in a family-friendly webblog like this one. Nasty press columns were written, Senate hearings were held. Those who play the role of foreign potentates and emissaries are vain, deceitful and at times ill-intentioned. The political opposition is unscrupulous and perfectly willing to compromise the interests of the United States if that can make trouble for the president and his team. Random groups of protestors disrupt administration planning sessions — today they were protesting the camel-cull now underway in Australia. The Dalai Lama, frustrated at having his request for a meeting with the president left hanging, summoned reporters to a press conference where, flanked by Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Richard Gere stand-ins, he denounced the administration’s kow-towing to China.
We do not succeed in creating situations as dangerous and poisonous as life in the real world. We cannot recreate the ‘politics of personal destruction’ in Washington or recreate the bizarre feeding frenzies that periodically overtake the Washington press corps. But we can try.
I think that’s a good thing.
It didn’t seem this way to me back in Third Form Latin class, trying frantically to come up with a half-plausible theory about why the damnable verb in some incomprehensible subordinate clause was in the subjunctive, but that experience was preparing me for more important tasks than deciphering how Labienus having been instructed by Caesar ordered the cohort to build a camp across the river from the Gauls. Thinking on your feet, staying calm under stress, bouncing back from humiliation and defeat, learning the importance of good preparation: these are not skills you are born with. They are things you must learn, and you can only learn them under fire.
Increasingly, American education seems dominated by the Lake Woebegone approach: “all the children are above average.” We wrap them in swaddling clothes and lay them in a manger, nurturing their self-esteem and encouraging them to believe that life is easy and that their native gifts will see them through.
But the world is hard. If you put something foolish in your Facebook account, it can wreck your career. If you say something stupid to a reporter, it can haunt you for years. If you make a mistake in dealing with a prickly foreign leader, thousands of people may die.
I’m not sure why the American educational system has moved so far towards Never-Never-Land. I don’t know why we’ve decided as a society that it’s better to put pillows under the students’ rear ends rather than putting knowledge into their heads.
The students in grand strategy are sometimes frustrated and angry. It’s not a fun experience to have world-class intellects like Kennedy, Gaddis and Hill picking holes in your brief while you stand, stuttering, in front of your Power Point slide as your classmates stare. But year after year more students apply for the seminar than can get in. This year, so many applied that the faculty decided to split the seminar into two sections to give more students a chance.
There are special features about the Yale grand strategy class that make it attractive to students. But I suspect that the pain is part of the allure. Students aren’t nearly as stupid as teachers sometimes think they are, and these days they know that the world they will enter is a tough and challenging one. They are worried about how they can get both the intellectual and the personal training that will prepare them for the tough tasks ahead. Teachers and schools who advertise high standards and real training will probably not drive students away in this kind of atmosphere; they will attract them.
I hope that’s right. As I look at the challenges our country faces at home and abroad, I’m convinced that the next generations of leaders will need to be smarter, better educated, more focused and more solidly grounded in values that last than my own generation has been. (The two baby boomer presidents so far have been Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Am I making myself clear?) And those skills won’t just be needed by political leaders managing the high politics and juggling the fate of the nation; they will be needed by people leading universities and corporations in a time of upheaval. They will be needed by people steering their careers as once stable professions become less secure. The next generation will need, in short, an education more like the one we try to give in the grand strategy course than like the one you get watching Sesame Street.
Next Saturday I’ll be back up at Yale for the final session of the simulation. The students will give it all they have; so will the staff. That’s the way education should work.