Agility, Adaptability and Innovation: the Art of the Counter-Punch

[Schmedlap]

The degree traditionally has been required in order to ensure that the officer has the basic skills and knowledge (writing, grammar, vocabluary, history, etc.) Unfortunately, today most university degrees in no way give even a reasonable assurance of this.

In my opinion, ROTC should be trying to correct this (perhaps it is already attempting to do so? I hope so). Instead of simply requiring 4 years of military science, a minimum GPA, and the other trivial requirements, there should be some more rigorous safeguards to ensure that our cadets take a legitimate course of study to obtain the benefits of a liberal education.

Using history courses as an example - if State U allows students to fulfill their history "core requirement" by taking US Women's history, then Cadet Command (or whatever the governing body may be) may want to require cadets to take a comprehensive US history course that includes study of wars, significant political, diplomatic, and economic events, and the impacts of technological change upon society. This would seem to be more beneficial than a semester of learning about why America is bigoted, sexist, and oppressive. If the cadet has a sincere interest in Women's History, then that will remain an option - in addition to the required course - but the requirement for a more relevant study in history should be required to ensure that a course with an extremely narrow scope of questionable legitimacy is not the only course in history taken. Hopefully such measures have already been taken - there were no such standards that I was aware of when I was in ROTC.