Soldiers, sex education and sexual health, good manners
From today's Guardian:
A chilling article by a Falklands veteran, as to why an American marine shooting a prone Iraqi 'is just what soldiers are trained to do':
all your training is about breaking down soldiering into little pieces, the drills that you do again and again. Then those elements are put back together to build you into an effective ( Read more... )
This may be somewhat tangential, but recently I was sorting some archives relating to the psychology of officer selection and training in WWII. It was discovered that in terms of morale and not cracking up under strain it was officers from the non-traditional backgrounds, rather than the public school products, who were doing much much better. Given that the whole public school system was largely designed to produce an officer class through stern, even vicious, repression of the emotions and any signs of softness (or at least, this is often presented as a justification for the British public school system), I found this ironic. There may well be significant differences between what psychology would be desirable in an officer and in a private soldier.
And why anyone would want to play rugby is, I regret to say, one of those things by which I am totally baffled! I could envisage the value of automatic conditioned responses in something like emergency medicine, which often involves doing counter-intuitive stuff, and over-riding natural human reactions.
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Average quality of sample? Virtual all public school boys would have been seen as potential officers but only a small fraction of the rest. It's not at all unreasonable that the cream of the grammar schools would outperform the average of the public schools.
And why anyone would want to play rugby is, I regret to say, one of those things by which I am totally baffled!
Antidote to sedentary, cerebral existence. Rock climbing has a similar effect but the good climbing's a bit sparse around here.
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