Air University Review, May-June 1980

Professional Educators Versus Experts

EVERYONE is an "expert" on education. Twelve years in the public schools followed by a few more in college make a person knowledgeable in all the processes of schooling and how it should be done--or so many people think. The problem with this attitude, of course, is that such knowledge is confined to one's own experience and is not broad enough to include the myriad complexities of learning and educational systems.

As it is popularly understood, education is alone among the professions. Without apparent mystery such as that of medicine or ambiguity like that of law, education is-or appears to be-an accessible field of study to anyone with or without a study of the field.

Consider, for example, the place of education in the Air Force, The 75XX Air Force Specialty Code (AFSC) is named as the officer's education career field, but it has little to do intrinsically with educating. Instead, it is concerned with administering educational organizations, and so any officer who can administer anything can be and is assigned to this field. On the other hand, the 0940 AFSC is specifically for instructors, but it is held only for the duration of a temporary instructor assignment. It is not, therefore, a "career" and certainly not regarded as a profession.

Furthermore, to become an instructor requires only that a person be knowledgeable in the field to be taught (not surprising) and become a master of the mental processes of learning by completing an instructor course lasting all of six weeks (very surprising!). If nothing else, this serves only to foster the illusion that anyone can become an authority on education and all the mysteries of learning with little or no special study.

The question, of course, is not whether education is important but rather what is the best way to cause learning, organize learning activities, and organize a staff of people who are capable and knowledgeable enough to handle all of this. Experience may well be the best teacher, but without structuring, experience is inordinately time-consuming, wasteful, and, in the military, very dangerous. This, then, is the paradox-the feeling of many that education is important but educators are not.

THIS is not the thesis of two new books on Army education, each of which was written independently of the of the other and on quite different subjects. But reading them together reinforces the same conclusion. One is highly specialized history, The Leavenworth Schools and the Old Army by Timothy K. Nenninger.* The other is Common Sense Training,** a sort of guidebook of tips and techniques for teaching developed from the personal experience of its author, retired Army Lieutenant General Arthur S. Collins, Jr.

*Timothy K. Nenninger, The Leavenworth Schools and the Old Army: Education, Professionalism, and the Officer Corps of the United States Army, 1881-1918 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978, $15.95), 173 pages.

**Lieutenant General Arthur S. Collins, Jr., U.S. Army (Ret), Common Sense Training: A Working Philosophy for Leaders (San Rafael, California: Presidio Press, 1978, $11.95), 225 pages.

These two books have very different purposes and were written for very different readers. Nenninger has the historian-scholar in mind, and, judging from the price, his publisher has in mind limiting sales to libraries. The fifteenth in a series of volumes on military history, it documents in some detail the development of professional military education for Army officers in a twenty-seven-year period to the end of World War I.

Nenninger's experience as a military archivist at the National Archives has served him well. His book is authoritative, thoroughly documented, and well written. He traces the emergence of Army professional schools through such stages as "General Sherman and the School of Application," "The Elihu Root Reforms," "General Bell and the New Leavenworth," "The American Expeditionary Forces Experience," and other events.

Collins's book is written more for commanders of training units than instructors, but he includes a number of specific teaching tips for use in classroom and field instruction. His approach is clearly pragmatic. His message is that whatever works and gets results by the most direct and efficient means is good. Everything else should be eliminated.

So, for example, in a chapter cm "Advice for and about Generals," he deplores the time and effort spent by training units preparing for visits by high-ranking officials. He asserts that when officials visit units in training, "Clean work benches and wet floors [from recent scrubbing] are indicators of poor leadership and hours of lost maintenance time." (p. 208) Collins wants the time and resources used for learning, not for making things look good just to impress someone. This laudable and practical approach to teaching is applied to a variety of training situations and subjects in separate chapters: "Training Management," and so on.

Unfortunately, it is just a record of one man's personal experience and advice. However practical and wise his suggestions may be and however wide and important his experience has been, Collins needs documentation, research, and testimony to support his ideas. Many readers will be persuaded by the force of his writing style and the Army positions he held, hut there will be just as many who, if they disagree, will inevitably pass off Common Sense Training as just another man's opinion.

On the subject of "Training Management" and maintaining individual training records, Collins believes that

The best way to keep such records is in a small pocket notebook This method distributes the work load and allows each noncommissioned officer to spend only a few minutes a day on the training status of his or her troops. . . . do not advocate any comprehensive system of training records (p. 53)

It would be interesting to hear him defend this recommendation to accreditation evaluators or any other professional educator.

The problem is indicated early in the book as Collins asks, "If training is so important, why is it so often neglected?" (p. 1) A very good question. The rest of the book explains his own answer that it needs more "common sense." That may well be true, but it is simplistic. Other answers are also possible, not the least of which is that education in the military needs to be established as a career for professional educators.

Nenninger's book provides historical support for this second answer. Toward the end of his chapter on "Line School, Staff College, and Leavenworth Doctrine," he notes that "Contacts made at the schools had more than just social value. Numerous graduates attributed later success, at least in part, to associations first formed at Leavenworth." (p. 106) Later, "Because Leavenworth taught a systematic solution of operational problems, the personal contacts at the schools were particularly important." (p.1 07) Although mention is made of the curriculum, the implication is that this was secondary in importance to establishing personal relationships between students.

If this is still true, one might reasonably ask whether schools are needed to meet this objective. If learning is not the primary purpose, then schools are a tremendous and unwarranted expense. If it is the purpose, then perhaps we need a more professional approach to learning in order to capitalize fully on what is learned.

Nevertheless, Nenninger's account suggests that Leavenworth's ultimate objectives were met eminently well. He stresses the use made by the schools of what he calls the "applicatory" method of teaching, meaning that students did not just talk about managerial-operational problems and strategies. Rather, they applied the principles they studied in simulated situations. Creativity and initiative necessary to solve the problems in those situations sharpened their leadership skills and showed early which students would be effective in real situations later on and which would not.

The thesis is clear that without the experience of those schools, Army leadership in World War I and after could not have been as effective: ". . . there was no doubt that Leavenworth training paid off, made a difference in how an officer performed, and was an improvement from previous wars." (p. 149) Nenninger concludes, "By means of the applicatory method, however, Leavenworth had trained its graduates in systematic planning and problem solving under pressure. . . . thus contributing significantly to the success of the American army." (p. 151)

Nenninger is not especially interested in details of Leavenworth subject matter, course objectives, curriculum decision-making, teaching procedures and philosophy, student and course evaluation, and other aspects of the educational process. His attention instead is focused on how the schools were developed and the results of what was learned there rather than on the learning itself. Of course, his book is a history of Leavenworth schools, not Leavenworth education, and that makes all the difference.

For the present, the most that can be said about these two books is that they are interesting, perhaps even useful in some respects. But they do not go far enough to have much lasting or widespread educational impact.

Community College of the Air Force
Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama

Major James H. Conley (Ed.D., Columbia University Teachers College) is Chief, Affiliations Branch, Community College of the Air Force (CCAF), Maxwell AFB, Alabama. At Air University he was Senior Academic Advisor, Academic Instructor School, and at the USAF Academy he was Associate Professor of Fine Arts. He has written on education, language, and music and is composer-complier of four volumes of organ music. Major Conley is listed in Leaders in Education, Outstanding Educators of America, and other biographical references. He has been an American Council on Education fellow, 1979-80.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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