"We Need to Get the US Army Out of High Schools" by Jonah Walters
US Army JROTC students wait to march in the 248th annual St. Patrick's Day
parade March 17, 2009 in New York City. (Mario Tama / Getty Images)
A smattering of information has been revealed about Connor
Betts, the misogynist twenty-four-year-old who killed nine people and injured
twenty-seven in Dayton earlier this month.
One of them was that he was in the Bellbrook High School
Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program, according to a
classmate. We know little about Betts’s time in the program, the training he
received, or what impact it had on him. But it’s worth mentioning that we have
thousands of kids in America getting military training at school.
An estimated 500,000 high schoolers at 3,400 schools are
enrolled in the JROTC, administered jointly by the military and each local
school district. Students enrolled in JROTC classes are assigned ranks, taught
military comportment and demeanor, and required to wear military uniforms. In
most cases, students also receive training in military skills like marksmanship
using school shooting ranges.
The Pentagon insists that JROTC is not a recruitment
program, but a practical curriculum that teaches integrity and discipline — as
innocuous as sports or physical education. But between 40 and 50 percent of
students who complete three years of JROTC enlist in the military upon
graduation, in part because JROTC graduates can receive enhanced pay and
preferential benefits.
JROTC units are supervised by retired military officers who
are exempt from civilian teaching certification requirements. To retain federal
funding, each JROTC unit must maintain enrollment of 100 students or 10 percent
of the student body — leaving the program vulnerable to organized student and
parent boycotts.
Shooting Ranges Have No Place in
Schools (Obviously)
About 2,200 schools offer hands-on marksmanship training,
according to data from the Civilian Marksmanship Program, a
government-chartered entity that collaborates with JROTC units to create and
maintain school shooting ranges. Until about 2000, students were usually
trained on .22-caliber rifles, but nowadays instructors use pellet guns.
There have been efforts to end this practice. After the
Columbine High School shooting in 1999, Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley
disbanded the thirty-three “rifle teams” that had previously operated in that
city’s public schools. In 2009, the San Diego Unified School District banned
marksmanship training after years of sustained protest from students and
parents, removing the eleven shooting ranges that had previously operated at
public schools in that city.
ASVAB Is Not Healthy for Children or
Other Living Things
Under the guise of the innocuous-sounding “ASVAB Career
Exploration Program,” the Department of Defense administers the Armed Services
Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to some 655,000 students in twelve thousand
schools each year. The explicit purpose of the ASVAB test is to identify high
school juniors and seniors as candidates for targeted recruitment — but often
the test is marketed to school guidance counselors (and students) as a generic
career aptitude test.
In more than a thousand high schools around the country,
students are actually required by school policy to take the test, often without
parental knowledge. While schools may choose to administer the test without
sharing the results, it remains very difficult for students and parents
themselves to opt out of the ASVAB data-sharing process. In about 92 percent of
cases, ASVAB results are shared immediately with the military.
They’re Keeping Tabs on Your Kids
The Department of Defense database known as “JAMRS” (for
“Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies”) contains the names of some
30 million people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, for the purpose
of targeted military recruitment.
Top secret until 2005, a lawsuit from the American Civil
Liberties Union forced JAMRS to stop storing social security numbers, but the
database still contains information like students’ full names, addresses,
grade-point averages, and ASVAB test scores. The lawsuit also failed to prevent
JAMRS from storing race and ethnicity information, likely due to the military’s
long-standing interest in recruiting black and Latino students.
Creating JAMRS required compiling data from sources like the
Department of Motor Vehicles and the College Board, as well as purchasing data
from consumer marketing corporations — all at an estimated cost of about a
billion dollars. Thanks to the ACLU lawsuit, students can now have their name
and data placed in a “suppression file” by filling out an opt-out form. But
there is no way for students to completely delete their names from JAMRS.
It’s Not Just High School
In recent years, the Department of Defense has turned more
of its outreach focus toward children much younger than high schoolers.
“DoD STARBASE,” a program founded in 1993 and funded through
the military’s recruitment budget, brings fifth graders to tour military
facilities and introduce them to military careers.
“Mission: Readiness,” a nonprofit controlled by retired
generals, pairs military personnel with classrooms of pre-kindergarten children
(four-year-olds) to promote physical fitness and exercise. The organization,
which received its start-up cash through President Obama’s 2014 budget, was
founded in response to concerns about the battle-readiness of young enlistees.
The military sucks up billions of dollars every year that
could go to funding education. The least it could do is stop indoctrinating our
kids in the joys of warfare.
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