In honor of Veterans Day, we at the National Association of Scholars would like to extend our most heartfelt “thank you” to the brave men and women who serve and protect our nation.
While the majority of the nation has off today from school or work to commemorate this holiday, this question was rattling around in my head, how many Americans truly understand what that means? Academia has long failed to teach civics, history, and military history effectively, eroding patriotism at every level of education. In honor of our military, I’d like to explore this decline—along with the rise of woke ideology in our service academies—and discuss what can be done to reverse it.
In 2008, NAS published a symposium of sorts in our Spring issue of Academic Questions (AQ). In this issue, contributors offered their thoughts on the decline of military history within academia. For instance, Josiah Bunting III writes,
The decline of military history in universities reflects an indulged hatred of war and armies (now identified, as they should not be, with ‘conservatism’—another slipshod judgment), and of military people as not clever or, if clever, perverse in the vocation to which they devote their intellectual talents. It reflects the wide cultural chasm between academia and the American military, a chasm never deeper or wider than now, in the thirty-fifth year of the all-volunteer military.
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