In James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times, what seems to be implied about education when Thurber is summoned by General Littlefield?

In his humorous autobiographical work My Life
and Hard Times, James Thurber describes several peculiar encounters with a
military figure ironically named General Littlefield. Littlefield’s name is even more
comic since he is the “commandant of the cadet corps” at Ohio State University and since
one of his main responsibilities involves teaching the student cadets how to march
properly. Thurber’s description of his encounters with General Littlefield implies a
number of things about education, including the
following:

• Because Thurber cannot perform his
  military duties well, General Littlefield considers him – or people like him – “the main
  trouble with this university.” Thurber seems to imply that the general’s priorities are
  misplaced: a university should not, ideally, be a place obsessed with military training
  (especially mere marching) but a place in which real intellectual learning takes place.
  Failure in genuine learning might be considered a genuine source of trouble at a
  university; failure in performing military drills seems minor in
  comparison.


• When Thurber eventually becomes the best
  performer at military drill (simply because he continually fails it, year after year,
  and thus has eventually much more experience at it than younger students), the general
  suddenly admires him, thus completely reversing his earlier opinion. Thurber is even
  promoted to corporal. He is therefore rewarded for an achievement which, in the context
  of a university supposedly dedicated to higher education, is not much of an achievement
  at all.


• When Thurber is summoned to the general’s office,
  presumably to be congratulated for his achievement, the general can’t seem to remember
  who Thurber is or why he was summoned.  Thurber thus seems to imply that the general is
  not especially bright (or at least that his memory is not good). Perhaps Thurber is
  suggesting that the general is not especially well qualified to have an important
  position at an American university, although Thurber also seems to suggest that the
  general’s position is not really very important to begin
  with.


• When the general instructs Thurber to button up his
  coat, Thurber may be suggesting that the general is concerned only with superficial and
  trivial matters.  Presumably, a university is not a place in which superficial or
  trivial matters should be of much concern to anyone.


• The
  general’s obsessive focus on swatting flies during Thurber’s visit may also imply that
  his concerns are essentially trivial.


• At the conclusion
  of this encounter, Thurber seems as confused as his readers about the reason the general
  summoned him:

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He either didn’t know which cadet I was or else
he forgot what he wanted to see me about. It may have been that he wished to apologize
for having called me the main trouble of the university; or maybe he had decided to
compliment me on my brilliant drilling of the day before and then at the last minute
decided not to. I don’t know. I don’t think about it much
anymore.

Thurber’s last
sentence here implies, as his description of his whole encounter implies, that the whole
idea of being drilled in marching at an institution of higher learning is a bit
ridiculous and not really worth remembering.