THE PENTAGON GOES TO SCHOOL

...Big Daddy will thus be "a major instrument for youth socialization," taking over the moral, ethical, religious, disciplinary, social, and vocational functions formerly exercised by the family, the church, the school, and the civilian work setting...

...In the course of his carefully prepared remarks, Carr offered a series of "fairly safe guesses about the future of education in the military," which may be translated to read "the future of the military in education...

...A newspaper reporter or managing editor...

...A blackjack is improvised by filling a sack with wet sand...

...A machete can also be used for stabbing...

...Their success in doing so depends in large measure on their ability to prevent the Pentagon from coming any closer to the educational process...

...A 1969 study by economists at the University of Maryland disclosed that only 16 per cent of Army veterans found civilian employment related to their military specialty...

...While completing their high school education, they are officially members of the Reserves on inactive duty...

...TBy 1984, the military will have become a major instrument for youth socialization, assuming a large portion of the role once dominated by the family, the church, the school, and the civilian work setting...

...an important cause of rank-and-file unrest...

...He signs up for a seven-week course as an "Aviation Storekeeper...

...Besides, the memories of the protest movements against ROTC and the Vietnam war are fading fast...

...But what of his claim that "perhaps 85 to 90 per cent of the skills required in the military will relate to civilian occupations...

...Private eye...

...A 1971 survey conducted by the Veterans World Project of Southern Illinois University stated, "Almost 89 per cent [471 out of 530] of the veterans...

...Our educational system is in real trouble when military recruitment blurs this critical distinction between soldier and citizen...

...Further commitments of access to appropriate surplus materials, including uniforms, have also been extended...

...The blunt end of a hand ax can be used to stun an enemy, the cutting edge is employed to kill...

...The commission should be one of the busier adjuncts of the Council...

...The Department of Defense will also be assigned a major role in helping induct youth into the American work force...

...Of the Air Force: "The AFJROTC materials avoid controversy either by presenting only one side of a controversial issue or by making controversial issues into technical problems which are presented as non-controversial...

...Of the Army program they comment, "The values...

...said they were unable to use any of their military training or experience on the jobs they now hold...

...The Academic Freedom Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been so disturbed by these efforts that it has transmitted a new and radical set of policy proposals on secondary education and She military to its national board...

...And the extent to which they compromise the integrity of the educational enterprise may be debatable...

...The Academy, which had been scheduled to open in September 1979, would have been the first public secondary school in America devoted exclusively to training for a career in the armed forces...

...Ostensibly a testing program for civilian careers, ASVAB has been used as an important if devious mechanism for recruiting secondary-school students — the vital data have in the past been released to Army recruiters...

...In any event, after months of deliberation the Department of Defense decided that the use of military property and personnel would have violated a statutory provision...

...Although the idea for the Academy originated with the Cincinnati educational establishment, the Department of Defense assigned Captain John J. Eagan, the commander for Army recruiting in the area, to work full time in planning for the school's opening...

...But JROTC curricula are far more ambitious than this...

...Nor can anyone know how long the United States and other free nations will continue to be endangered by the military power and imperialistic designs of the Soviet and Chinese Communists...

...The 1975 AWOL rates of seventy-three per 1,000 in the Navy and 300 per 1,000 in the Marine Corps were the highest in the modern history of those services...

...The Academy's twelve-member "Program Development Committee" listed two professors of military science (one a colonel, the other a commander), a sergeant connected with the Morrow Army Reserve Center, and Captain Eagan...

...He chose the target year 1984, with full awareness of the date's Orwellian connotations, and predicted: ^Perhaps 85 to 90 per cent of the skills required in the military will be related to civilian occupations, and job transferability will create both new problems and new opportunities for military recruitment...

...Military history...

...The U.S...

...In 1968 former Defense Department Manpower Secretary Harold Wool acknowledged, in a scholarly treatise entitled "The Military Specialist," that "the frequency of various specific occupations within the military structure differs sharply from that of similar occupations in the civilian economy...

...In short, public school officials and educational policy-makers throughout the country became an arm of the military...

...The same year, the Bureau of the Budget studied the post-service employment experiences of soldiers from lower-income groups and found only 12 per cent who thought their civilian jobs made use of military-acquired skills...

...and the military services alike to more efficiently provide for our national defense and more effectively serve the public interest...

...The professed aim of this project was "to assist high school students toward making appropriate and proper decisions by providing the student with up-to-date information on career and educational opportunities existing in the military service...

...Though it is an inferior aptitude test, the probable reason schools prefer it is that it is furnished "free-of-charge" to the participating schools...

...But for the moment a skirmish has been won...

...In 1972 another study, this one prepared for the Office of the Special Assistant for the Modern Volunteer Army, observed that "the overriding complaint at the end of their tour [of duty by soldiers] is the lack of career training...

...Since the training courses were obviously to be based on those in the Junior ROTC program, something of their content may be gleaned from current Junior ROTC texts...

...So why cavil about a 200-year-old tradition...

...Never once hinting at possible economic causes of conflict and utterly fh-sulated from contact with professional modern historians, this Pentagon version of American history looks like a vintage flick starring William S. Hart and the U.S...

...Yet, the quality of training aside, the promise of future civilian careers related to military occupations is exaggerated at best, fraudulent at worst...

...Among the eight "special consultants," seven were affiliated with the military...

...Courses in chemistry, geometry, physics, foreign languages, biology, and even English are footnoted with the rubric "Individual Military Career Preparation," which is nowhere explained...

...consultants to provide inservice for the Institute [Academy] staff...

...The latest (1972) edition of the Army JROTC manual, Introduction to Leadership Development, devotes twelve chapters to U.S...

...Nor is there any guarantee that, once enlisted, the individual will be trained in the area of his choice...

...Carr himself has been gagged or has chosen to remain silent...

...His "fairly safe guesses" merit the attention of anyone concerned with education...

...The services have enthusiastically offered other no-cost assistance, including consultants for program development...

...The Program for Increased Education (PIE) is a classic instance of Or-well's Newspeak — it leads to decreased education...

...This was the curriculum that the Cincinnati Board of Education was prepared to adopt for its Military Academy...

...Carr candidly admitted that "the strains between higher education and the military are real and they run deep...

...We may not be particularly shocked to find in the second-year army manual, Intermediate Leadership Development, the following, which is addressed to fifteen-year-old high school students: "You may want to take silent weapons in killing, stunning or capturing individuals...

...tBy 1984 the military and education will have entered into a massive new partnership symbolized by modern learning centers on military bases around the world...

...Within the next five years it must recruit more than one out of three male eighteen-year-olds to meet its goal of an active-duty military force of 2.1 million men and women...

...Original emphasis...

...The project was terminated in January 1978, though on whose initiative is still unclear...

...In response to inquiries, the Department of Defense has insisted that Carr was only speculating about the future...

...The question is how far the military should be allowed to go...

...Cavalry' Seas," and "Organization for National Security and Intelligence...

...Physical education is footnoted with the rubric, "Military Related Activity," which presumably speaks for itself...

...In the United States, the traditional separation of military training from public education would seem to derive from the belief that the values of the one run counter to the values of the other...

...This is probably still the practice despite promises secured by Representative Charles Mosher of Ohio and the ACLU Project on Privacy and Data Collection that it would be discontinued...

...In 1975, 21.6 per cent of all Marines discharged received other than honorable discharges...

...A machete can also be used for cutting and stabbing...

...If Carr was indeed blueprinting the future relationship between education and the military, the Pentagon is clearly attempting to move well beyond the ROTC concept which until now has been the most conspicuous connection between the two...

...And it must accomplish this task precisely when the number of seventeen-to-twenty-two-year-olds promises to be the smallest in our history in proportion to the total population...

...And the President of the Cincinnati Board has promised, "We will keep trying...

...For a thorough analysis and evaluation of JROTC teaching there is probably no better study than "A Consideration of Curricula" (1975) written by Steven Selden and Alan H. Feldman of the Graduate School of Education of the University of Pennsylvania...

...To this end, the Cincinnati Public Schools have received initial commitment from the services relative to no-cost requisition of these and other related items...

...What of the curriculum...

...Education implies creativity, improvement of the human condition, and preservation of cherished societal values...

...involvement in coun-terinsurgency is essential if our democratic way of life is to survive...

...The Navy JROTC curriculum on counterintelligence states, "U.S...

...The most visible of these is the advertisement of "career-training" in the services...

...It may be that once the issue received nationwide publicity on National Public Radio and CBS, the academy threatened to become too hot to handle...

...In most cases, students spend half or all of their senior year undergoing combat training, after which they return to school, collect their diplomas, and start serving the rest of their stint with the Guard...

...Consider an extraordinary speech delivered in 1977 to the National Council on Continuing Education by Thomas W. Carr, then the Director of Defense Education in the Office of the Secretary of Defense...

...The soldier who obeys his superior officer without question except in the most extreme circumstances is essentially different from the citizen who prizes his freedom to think dangerous thoughts and to challenge even legally sanctioned authority...

...In its 1973 "Report on Disciplinary Problems in the U.S...

...And, astonishingly, New York City's Board of Education, anything but a bastion of militarism, has just approved the establishment of a Junior ROTC program at Julia Richman High School in Manhattan...

...The Project's Privacy Report has warned, "Litigation may become necessary if it proves that the agreement won by Congressman Mosher does not effectively deal with ASVAB's serious infringement on the right of privacy...

...Nor were the military aspects of the Academy mere window dressing...

...Why...

...Two years later, service-wide AWOL and desertion rates stood respectively at eighty-six per 1,000 and twenty-six per 1,000...

...Although students are not present in any high school classes, the school gives academic credit for training which is planned, supervised, and conducted by the military...

...The average American may take these incursions in stride...

...He studies "Basic Law Enforcement" for five weeks...

...A recent study shows that the chance to learn a valuable skill is the single most important attractor to the Armed Forces of sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old men not in the military...

...The Academy itself must have seemed irresistible to a school system faced with severe budgetary problems — the Pentagon was sure to throw its financial weight behind a scheme that might set the pattern for military training on a national scale...

...Statistics may be tricky, but whatever else these figures reveal, they suggest that some radical changes will have to be made in career-training within the military before "85 to 90 per cent of the skills" relate to civilian occupations...

...These are hardly grounds to cheer civil libertarians...

...Whatever its social implications, recruitment on this scale during peacetime is bound to have an enormous impact on education — all the more so because high school and college enrollments are in sharp decline...

...Military programs can help individuals gain confidence in their ability to learn, demonstrate the relationship of learning to real life, and sharpen their interest in more learning...

...The attraction of this program is not only the money the student receives for his own participation, but also the bounty he gets for persuading three other students to enlist — he is entitled to higher rank and additional pay on entering active service...

...Actually, the Council was a conduit for channeling recruitment information from the military to the school population...

...Or possibly, intent on pressing for a Registration Act and then for a revival of the draft, the Pentagon thought it wiser to wash its hands of the academy...

...Cavalry...

...In effect, he too becomes a military recruiter...

...Degrees, which may be awarded either by CCAF (Community College of the Armed Forces) or a cooperating civilian institution, will require five to ten years to obtain...

...Could any blueprint for an Orwellian 1984 be more at odds with the traditions of American education and with democratic values as we have known them...

...In this egregious narrative, Indians are referred to as "savages" who have to be "pacified...

...Wool went into great detail to prove the point and concluded that overall 80 per cent of military jobs are in occupational areas which account for only 10 per cent of civilian jobs...

...will be maximized...

...Nor is the problem simply logistical...

...This record is somewhat less than convincing evidence that the Pentagon is performing brilliantly in inducting youth into the American work force, to say nothing of "youth socialization...

...The special meanings given to the terms used in the leadership training section of the MCJROTC," they write of the Marine Corps program, "lead to the conclusion that this section fosters values that are inconsistent with the democratic goals of American secondary education...

...In a letter, a copy of which has been obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Raymond J. Brokamp, Assistant Superintendent of Schools in Cincinnati, wrote to the Pentagon, "Throughout the entire program, utilization of military instructional materials, equipment, forms, procedures, etc...

...Carr is probably right — the chance to learn a valuable skill is the single most important attraction of the armed services to young men...

...Government's -Director of Defense Education was only playing the role of a passive and disinterested Nostradamus...

...While most Americans probably regard the military as a necessary evil in a less than perfect world, they recognize that if the nation requires an army of 2.1 million, the Pentagon can meet this requirement only if it is allowed to tap the country's most abundant reservoir of recruits — the public secondary schools...

...At the end of the latter topic, the cadet is expected to be able to "1) Describe and discuss the forces at work to undermine our government and way of life, overt and covert, and 2) Describe and discuss the various measures developed to counteract these forces...

...Irwin Stark, professor emeritus of English at the City University of New York and a member of the A CL 0 Academic Freedom Committee, is a free-lance writer and the author of two novels, "The Invisible Island"and "Subpoena...

...If A major thrust to tie together military training and civilian education will result in the establishment of the largest degree-granting institution in the world...

...The Assistant Superintendent concluded that "what has been proposed here may well serve as a national model for both public school systems 'The trench knife and bayonet are excellent weapons...

...Another effective weapon, the garotte, may be made by fastening a wood handle to each end of an eighteen-inch length of wire...

...Whether this represents actual Pentagon planning or is something out of farthest cuckoo-land, in its insatiable drive for recruits the military has already invaded the secondary schools through a number of strategies about which the general public knows next to nothing...

...For, according to Carr, military training per se looks like an afterthought...

...A course such as "Electronic Warfare Technician" runs for five to nine or twenty to forty-six weeks, for example, and the related civilian occupations are listed as "Electronics Intelligence Operation Specialist" and "Electronics Mechanic...

...Whatever the large and serious deficiencies of the public secondary schools, they remain our best hope for transmitting the values of a democratic society from one generation to another...

...And all of this will be accomplished by an institution which "stresses obedience, established procedures, and hierarchy — and has little interest in a more abstract search for purer knowledge...

...He takes a ten- to eleven-week coursein "Applied Journalism...

...And of Navy JROTC: "The values...

...Whatever we may think of the schemes and devices currently in use — and with the exception of PIE they all operate on the periphery of the educational process — there can be no doubt that the proposed Cincinnati Military Academy would have breached the 200-year-old tradition which has separated military training from the American public school classroom...

...Moreover, "No one can predict whether there will be another world war...

...Having signed the enlistment agreement and taken the oath of enlistment, they are legally obligated to report for active duty after graduation...

...The Mexican War starts "when Mexican forces ventured north of the Rio Grande...

...Forget those journalism schools...

...Military History, Leadership (four years), Military Science (three years), Contemporary Military Issues, Uniform Code of Military Justice, and Fundamentals of Navigation...

...Original emphasis...

...In November 1976, for example, the Pentagon donated more than $376,000 to the Council of Chief State School Officers for its "Education/Military Liaison Project...

...Was this the consequence of his amazing candor...

...are found to be those of life-adjustment, unquestioning obedience to authorities, leadership of the military type, and inequality of women...

...In the "Leadership Section" of the Navy JROTC, six sessions are devoted to the "Behavioral Sciences" and the section on "The Organization of the Navy" devotes another six to such topics as "Types of International Struggle," "The Importance of Control of the '. . .This Pentagon version of American history looks like a vintage flick starring...

...In fact, the Pentagon's recent efforts to solve the problem have already sent shock waves through the educational community...

...Under PIE, students enlist in the National Guard while still in high school and receive credit towards graduation for "on-the-job-training...

...A more direct approach to the student is the Delayed Entry Program (DEP), a recruiting mechanism which encourages students to enlist as early as their junior year of high school...

...In addition to daily military drill, the program of studies offered U.S...

...Baker, butcher, court reporter, truck driver, weather observer, even orchestra conductor — the Guide lists these and some hundred other "related" civilian jobs...

...Top priority appears to be given to the teaching of job-related skills and the effort to "demonstrate the relationship of learning to real life" as the military conceives real life to be...

...In the process, the Pentagon will set up its own learning centers on military bases and establish "the largest degree-granting institution in the world...

...A report in The Washington Post informs us that ROTC is "booming" in the secondary schools of the District of Columbia and suburban Prince George's County...

...Does the enlistee hope to become something more prosaic, an accountant perhaps...

...Many enlistees have sought release from the services because the training promised by the recruiter failed to materialize...

...is willing to suffer on behalf of the policy of military assistance in opposition to aggressive communism...

...Arecruiting scheme far more pernicious because it is potentially more corrupting has been the funding of school personnel by the Department of Defense...

...And the American Council on Education has taken the unprecedented step of establishing a commission "to guide relationships between the military services and higher education...

...American young people in increasing numbers will join the military seeking post-secondary education and training...

...The trench knife and bayonet are excellent weapons...

...Navy," the House Armed Services Committee pointed out that "recruiting advertising appears to promise more than the Navy is able to deliver" — surely the understatement of the year — and noted that this "unrealistic picture" is '[This] may well serve as a model for both public school systems and the military services alike...

...It was to be quartered in Cincinnati's Seymour Avenue Armory, faculty as well as students were to wear military uniforms, and the armed forces were to provide military equipment, tutor students, and conduct regulation drill every day of the school year...

...And why not...

...and when feasible, instructions for specific courses...

...It is administered to more than 1.3 million students in some 15,850 high schools at a cost to the Pentagon of about $4.8 million annually...

...Shortly after delivering this speech, Carr was suddenly removed from his office and transferred to the Federal Acquisition Institute...

...But it is difficult to believe that the U.S...

...The Navy, for instance, issues a Navy Career Guide, a glossy, multicolored, profusely illustrated brochure which is, guidance counselors are assured, "a valuable counseling tool...

...Page after page glowingly presents the Navy job for which the enlistee may be trained, together with the related civilian occupations awaiting him when he leaves the service...

...The military stresses obedience, established procedures, and hierarchy — and has little interest in a more abstract search for purer knowledge...

...the U.S...

...becomes involved in the Spanish-American War because "the American people, normally sympathetic to the aspirations of colonials for independence, favored the insurgent cause," and in World War I because "news of the Zimmerman note gave evidence of German meddling with American affairs...

...are clearly those of the military and not those students need to contribute to a democratic society...

...llThe potential battle between the military and higher education over eighteen-year-olds will be avoided by their joining together in a series of cooperative ventures...

...Moreover, the project would not have been "cost-effective...

...In the case of the Cincinnati Military Academy, at least, the story has a happy if somewhat tentative ending, especially for the church groups, the local branch of the ACLU, and those Cincinnati teachers who vociferously opposed the project...

...The case of Vietnam," the student is told, "illustrates graphically the dangers and sacrifices the US...

...However necessary to the performance of the armed forces, the values of the military — which emphasize obedience, hierarchy, and conformity with established procedures — are in basic respects incompatible with the values of American education — which, at least ideally, emphasize self-discipline, the free interchange of ideas, and diversity of behavior and attitude...

...Or had his revelations been somewhat premature...

...In conjunction with the career pitch, the military employs another device, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB...