[November 22, 2017] It was many years ago that the group of 200 young Lieutenants were standing rigidly at the position of attention. In front of them was a battle-hardened senior officer giving them advice on how to succeed at all U.S. Army schools. The first piece of advice was that any feelings, desires, and wants they have would hurt their learning abilities and future success.
They would reject this advice only at their peril. My buddy and I were standing there on a hot, humid day at Fort Benning, Georgia. We were to become, much later in our careers, senior officers ourselves and firm believers in what he said that day. To us, what this man said was golden information that only later our experience would validate.
Twenty years later as a full colonel, my buddy would be assigned as the commander of a training brigade. His responsibility was to ensure that all new officers and enlisted personnel attending his school would learn from the very best instructors the U.S. Army could provide. It also meant creating the best learning environment. Standing before each class he would tell them that any feelings, desires, and wants they had would prohibit their best chance of learning and success.
One of my themes here at theLeaderMaker.com is that the best, most successful leaders do not think in a conventional, linear way. Sometimes to be a better leader we have to unlearn old ways of thinking that are driven by our emotions in order to learn new methods. Those who refuse to reject the old are imprisoned by their culture and formal education. New military students often snub the wisdom of classic military texts, such as Clausewitz’s On War and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and thus unable to engage with those ideas on the merits.
My buddy says that before his instructors can teach them how to think critically, they must first be taught how to rid themselves of unreason. He is blunt about this … modern culture and formal education in America is indoctrination about issues irrelevant for the successful military soldier. Reasoning thus requires one to learn how to understand things that make you uncomfortable or simply don’t like.
He is interested in teaching new soldiers of all ranks how to rid their minds of illogic and learn to disassociate truth with their subjective feelings; the latter being neither true nor false but only in their mind and subject to change. There is, of course, no formula for this but the first thing they must do is be receptive of new ideas and new ways to think.1 Part of that means rejecting political ideologies (like socialism) and of social ideologies (like materialism) because they do not promote understanding.
Learning means accepting new values that promote understanding and acceptable ways to disagree and argue one’s position. Otherwise, you are just marking time and wasting the valuable resources of the people of the United States.
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- For a good idea of this see professor Adam J. MacLeod’s article about “Undoing the Dis-Education of Millennials” here: http://newbostonpost.com/2017/11/09/undoing-the-dis-education-of-millennials/