Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 100

so that it may never be abolished.”13 In all military
schooling, grades are controlled by instructors and
tied to performance reports and promotion. This
creates a constant tension in all aspects of professional
education as learners’ careers can succeed or fail based
on their grades. Moreover, the methodology establishes a learning hierarchy, not so subtly reinforced by the
fear of punishment or failure. Within this framework,
teachers use “the art of distance” to control and measure the rate of student progress. Teachers establish
hierarchical learning distances. As their students
progress through careful and controlled explication,
they close each gap, only to have a new distance applied as a new lesson begins.14 Granted, the U.S. Army
Learning Concept for 2015 (U.S. Army Training and
Doctrine Command pamphlet 525-8-2) does offer
recognition of multiple learning models. However,
close examination of the concept reveals it remains
largely shackled to explication methodology, substituting the innocuous term facilitator for teacher or
instructor while placing the power in that individual.
The concept states that “facilitators are responsible for
enabling group discovery,” which implies that only the
teacher can guide the group, and without the instructor
the class cannot discover anything of significant merit.15
The only way students might become equal to their
teachers would be to master the topics as well as their
teachers have mastered them. However, in the overarching military career path, graduating from one level opens
up yet another winding path with yet another master
waiting at the next plateau, using controlled distance
to maintain a constant hierarchy of knowledge control.
Students, whether in the Officer Basic Course or the U.S.
Army War College, are shackled to the old master structure, where without the master leading the way, the students might get lost and never complete the journey.16 Per
Rancière, the old master teaching model rests on the idea
that students lack the will or ability to learn on their own,
and only with the master’s will can they make the intellectual journey to the next level.17 Therefore, a class of armor
lieutenants alone, even with piles of military manuals and
courseware, could never properly learn how to maneuver
tanks on the battlefield without an instructor there to
guide them or to facilitate group discovery. Classes of War
College colonels are as dependent on the academic to lead
them on strategic lessons as a class of first graders learning
their alphabet.
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This notion of explication is a core principle of how
the military conceives of and manages learning (its values
about learning, the epistemological level) and how it approaches pedagogy (its values about teaching, the methodological level). This is true even if we claim to embrace
decentralized learning concepts such as self-structured or
peer-based learning in our instructor-centric programs.18
The Army’s approach to counterinsurgency, and
especially to security force assistance, reflects this approach. We maintain the two tenets of the old master
model with all foreign security forces—they are the
students, and we are the masters. Without our teaching,
foreign trainees cannot progress to mastery. In this way,
we establish the distance, measure their progress, and
guide them on the proper path to becoming a functional
military force that only we can actualize as masters of
explication. We lock them in a tautological loop from
which they cannot escape.

Emancipation From the Old Master
Model
Rancière describes Jacotot’s intellectual emancipation approach to teaching as the ignorant schoolmaster
method. The premise is that teachers can be, even must
be, partially ignorant of what and how students will
learn. The teaching method to be adopted in any situation is purely under control of the students, and there
is no hierarchical relationship in that “the route the student will take is unknown [to the teacher].”19 Instead of
teaching based on a relationship of inequality, distance,
and the implied requirement that the teacher be a master of all the knowledge students would gain, Jacotot
experimented with teaching French through topics of
which he was completely ignorant. He gave his students
control of their exploration of knowledge.20
In nineteenth century France, news of Jacotot’s
unconventional educational philosophy created quite
a stir. His intellectual emancipation method remains
worthy of debate. His approach, and Rancière’s
twentieth-century interpretation, could apply to any
discipline, military or otherwise. To apply Rancière’s
ignorant schoolmaster method to security force assistance, soldiers would need to accept his assertions that
teachers and students must free their minds of the old
master framework; soldi ers would need to reject the
idea that students are dependent on masters to help
them learn. In addition, according to Rancière, teachers
March-April 2015  MILITARY REVIEW