The Road Less Travelled. I have to admit it. I hate to admit it, but I have to admit it. West Point was seminal.
At the time, the professors told me that they didn’t want to teach me what to think, but how to think. At the time, I thought that if they taught me what to think, then the controlled me on one issue, but if they taught be how to think, they controlled me on all issues.
A couple decades later, I know that neither was true. They weren’t teaching me what to think. They weren’t teaching me how to think. They were teaching me TO THINK. There is a difference, and while they had the right idea, they did not know the best way to state it.
I used to hate West Point. I had a lot of resentment. I hated most grads. When I left there, I imagined replacing some of the granite stones with faux stones that were really explosives. I am serious. I fantasized about how to blow the place up. (Enter the NSA and the FBI, as they will most likely pick up this thread.)
But it was a fantasy based on my resentments. It did not account for the goodness of many of the cadets. I hated so much about the place. I hated the idea that they were more concerned with whether you could see a reflection of 2 fingers in your spit-polished boots than whether your rifle was functional and clean. I hated the idea that they would inspect for dust on your mouse as a “gotcha” but they never gave a shit about the rifle in the weapon’s rack.
At least that that was my experience.. I hated the institution for more reasons than that, but during my time, those are a couple examples I am willing to point out. Fuck that West Point, frankly.
As I understand, they have gotten better about some of the things I despised. Maybe.
But do you want to know what they got right? They taught me to think. At the time, I thought they were controlling me by teaching me “how to think.” They phrased it badly. They weren’t teaching me how to think. They were teaching me to think. There is a profound difference. The professors and cadre didn’t understand the linguistic differences at the time. But they still did the right thing. They taught us to think. Not how to think, not what to think.
“Two roads diverged in the woods and I took the one less travelled” by, Robert Frost. That is a poetic version of being a thinker. And that has made all the difference.
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