What Military Education Forgets: Strategy is Performance

I look at training as being hands-on such as the ability to complete a series of processes. Education leans toward fundamentals.

CH (COL) Geoff Bailey my experience in 2006-2007 at the Naval War College sounded a lot like what they were advocating for. Didn’t sound like the ‘military’ needed to change. Sounded like one branch needed to change. The authors experience was 100% Army schools.

Training is not the prime focus of ILE nor War College. Education is the ability to synthesize different information to build conclusions and solutions in different conditions and environments....how to think.

Training is teaching people how to do something given certain tasks under certain conditions....what to think.

I'm all about education being about performance.

Sooner or later, the pilot has to have physically flown the plane and the farmer has to have grown crops. You do go to school to learn information but teachers should also be subject matter experts (SME). I've had some college courses where I understood the materials better than the 'instructor' I was by no means a SME. There are many things & ways available to improve BUT they will not come with a School Grade.

An example was a course called, "Computer Programming" - $610.00 for the semester. They should have called it by its true name of "Microsoft Office Suite Tutor" because that's all it was. I withdrew after the first week and got my money back. I kept the $240 dollar program I had purchased for the course and used the tutor until I was passing all the subject areas with no mistakes. It took about a week of 3-4 hours for 5 days as opposed to 3 classes a week of 4 hours for 6 weeks. I saved money by withdrawing AND time (the other 5 weeks that I didn't continue) so I considered it a win-lose.

I wasn't taking the course for a college credit, but to improve myself. My loss was due to several factors. I really wanted to be learning programming NOT a single program. The first week was waste of my time + the college failed to meet my needs.

I will say the class did provide the student the tools to perform but its failure was to correctly id itself. In presenting that course as Computer Programming, the college’s students were misled. The same was true for the companies, organizations and the rest of the university/college community by the mis-representation.