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Great post on the need for independent and radical thought in the armed forces & the challenges to encouraging/accessing it.
There are some things within this worth unpacking, though. First, there is a distinction difference between a culture of pragmatism and one of anti-intellectualism. They sometimes overlap, I agree, and ruthlessly demanding the benefits of education/thought to be measurable in
the short term often has the same effect as actually being anti-intellectual. However there is a difference between not valuing thought and struggling to foster it within rigid existing structures which are often determined by powerful stakeholders resistant to change
It is also worth stressing that independent thought is not necessarily original thought. Good ideas may happen in more than one place within an organisation at a time, and may be being actioned at higher levels without individuals knowing. What seems like a local good idea may
also not seem so good in a broader context, or against the backdrop of significant bodies of extant research/expertise. There is thus a danger in axiomatically viewing 'creative' or 'disruptive' thought as superior to existing practice. Being disruptive is not a substitute for
deep engagement and thought about existing ideas and practice, and can often only really happen once a deep familiarity with a problem or topic has been achieved. Academia teaches you this humbling lesson rather often - I constantly have great 'new' ideas, before finding them
(crushingly) to have already been written about at great length and in ways I would never have thought possible by people who have come before me. I think that this is an often under-rated benefit of academic involvement in PME - the process of research itself teaches one quite
a lot about conceiving and promulgating ideas, and how bodies of thought shift and change over time for a wide variety of reasons.
