ABSTRACT
The official mission of the Virginia Military Institute is "to produce educated and honorable men and women, prepared for the varied work of civil life, imbued with love of learning, confident in the functions and attitudes of leadership, possessing a high sense of public service, advocates of the American Democracy and free enterprise system, and ready as citizen-soldiers to defend their country in time of national peril". This chapter discusses the wax and wane of civic education in Western culture and in American higher education in particular, describes Isocratean pedagogy, and then explores why this pedagogy is particularly well-suited for the overlapping academic and military cultures at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). VMI relatively large number of the faculty and administrators has prior military service. Military ethic is present in all the classrooms, as all tenure-track faculty members receive commissions in the Virginia Militia and therefore teach in uniform, and all the students come to class in uniform as well.
