Education Quote by John Keegan

Keegan’s line lands like a dry confession from someone who spent a lifetime arguing that institutions shape behavior as much as individuals do. “Nobody should” is the historian’s sweeping generalization, the kind you can imagine him making about generals, governments, or the inertia of old empires. Then comes the snap-back: “but I did.” The humor is self-implicating, but it’s also a neat, miniature portrait of how careers actually happen - not as grand choices, but as accumulation, habit, and the soft coercion of stability.

The intent feels less like martyrdom than warning: long tenure in one classroom can calcify a teacher’s curiosity, turning expertise into routine and students into repeats of last year’s audience. Yet Keegan isn’t simply indicting academia; he’s admitting complicity. The subtext is that teaching, like soldiering in the campaigns he chronicled, creates its own enclosed world with perverse incentives: safety over risk, mastery over experimentation, institutional loyalty over reinvention.

Context matters because Keegan’s authority came from distance. Famously not a combat veteran, he became one of the great writers on warfare by observing, reading, and teaching - work done in the long, fluorescent shadow of the lecture hall. That’s why the line works: it’s a modest punchline that quietly defends the very thing it critiques. He shouldn’t have stayed, he did stay, and from that supposedly limiting choice he built a vantage point that changed how civilians understand war.