John McCain is an educated man.  A highly educated man.  A man who has attended many, many classes in manifold schools. And a man with enough (harsh!) first-hand experience of history and of war that he should possess a deep, personal understanding of the principles and causes of both.  Any man who has endured what he has endured, without understanding its causes, would be driven almost certainly into insanity.

But an educated man would not have said what John McCain said in last night’s YouTube debate: “[The United States] allowed Hitler to come to power with that kind of isolationism.” The statement is so shockingly uninformed and uneducated that one becomes unsure what history (or even vocabulary) John McCain does understand. The errors in that statement are so numerous that it would take many blog entries to discover and to correct them. The errors are so profound that they raise serious questions of his competence for leadership.

The recent post on mises.org of Nock’s speech “The Theory of Education in the United States” explains the core issue: training is not education.  John McCain is immensely, incredibly trained for war but seems not very educated about it.

And when senior US senators do not understand history, we are all doomed to repeat it.