Haldane’s Mackindergarten: A Radical Experiment in British Military Education?

This article investigates the origins, development, and impact of a unique experiment in British military education. It began in 1907 as part of the radical post-Boer War reforms of the British army, and ended in 1932, a victim of the May committee’s financial austerity programme that was forced on the War Office. ‘The Class for the Administrative Training of Army Officers’ was run by the London School of Economics on behalf of the War Office. Its students consisted primarily, but not exclusively, of army logistics officers. It was a synthesis of the ideas and praxis of two men: Richard Haldane, then secretary of state for war, and the polymath Sir Halford Mackinder, then director of the LSE. It delivered a syllabus of officer education that was embedded in a number of ‘special ideas’. The first of these argued that the army existed to produce power, used both to maintain peace and in war to achieve victory. The second was a focus on the power of efficiency, interpreted as an outcome of both empirical knowledge and imagination. Both these ‘special ideas’ linked the course to one of the core functions of strategy, identifying the most suitable means to achieve set objectives. The course represented a synthesis between the practical utility of information and the general principles underlying these special ideas. Despite its radical approach the course passed the hard litmus test of military education. It covered a diverse number of subjects in a relatively short period of time, while ensuring that a single objective was met. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]