War Education Analysis

What should we bargain in our education and what content should we write into the textbook to prevent the following generation from waging war? Concerning these enquires, which put forth by Virginia Woolf nearly a century ago, it seems the human race fails to give a satisfactory riposte. No matter how hard human beings have tried, war stays to be an inevitable matter. Some people state this frustrating and inescapable result is caused by human’s aggressive instinct: we are inherently violent and egocentric. However, is human nature truly so selfish and hostile that human race are doomed to be uneducable in war prevention? Or there is indeed something problematic with the way we teach warfare, and those drawbacks hinder us from comprehensively

In today, most institutions tend to teach war in a very unitary and rationalized fashion, i.e., while studying war, students should alienate their personal emotions and use scientific method to quantify relevant factors and to objective analyze the cause and motives of war. For instance, soldiers as other military cargos can be simplified into numbers. Also, to further simplify warfare, some trivial information shall also be trailered. For example, personal narratives, biography, war related poetry and memoirs could be more or less summarized or even ignored. Only relevant information like data of casualty, time, and involving parties should be preserved. In a nutshell, in this political charged era most of the universal education expect scholars in war only analyze the core causes of the war, which, as Clausewitz states, is politics, for war is essential an continuation of

Moreover, at the same time, this method creates another seriously issue: it alienates students from connecting to war, and thereof creates an indifferent attitude towards war. As the essay mentions earlier, one of the rudimental steps that this method need to take is maximally simply war, which including the of quantification of soldiers and the elimination of personal emotions. In essence, this method is dehumanizing both the object they study and the scholars who are studying. However, humans are no commodities or lifeless numbers. Humans breath, walk, love, and cry. By adopting this method as the only major way of study, scholars are abandoning their rights to be a human. Additionally, if students get used to this kind of dehumanizing method, it is more likely that those people will be unconcern, indifferent or even contemptuous towards warfare. War may appear to them as no more than a political rivalry, a number games, or a business conflict. Moreover, because they distant themselves from the blood and fresh contest and the life-and-death scenario, they may be more easily to wage a new war, and this is problematic and