ABSTRACT
The humanities excel at fostering critical, creative, and empathic thinking. However, in military education, critical and creative thinking is frequently reduced to the ability to contribute to processes of decision-making that distill chaos into actionable outcomes. This chapter argues that the reduction of ambiguity and the insistence on “usefulness” in military education risks hollowing out curricula that claim to teach creative and critical thinking. Taking an explorative and comparative angle to the humanities’ neglected place in military education in the US and Sweden, the chapter engages with Martha Nussbaum’s ideas on the humanities’ ability to foster active, critical, and curious thinkers. Placing the increasingly precarious existence of the humanities at American military academies alongside a Swedish debate about the difference between training and educating (“utbildning” and “bildning”) reveals the nature of the pressure that the humanities increasingly face, and what we stand to lose if we fail to insist on its value.
