Education infiltration: the Pentagon targets high schools.

Problem: "America lags far behind in meeting its educational goals, and the quality of education in our country is below standard."

Question: How can the Federal Government "support local [school] districts in offering at-risk youth a new opportunity to be successful in school and thus in life"?

Solution: Send in the Marines. And the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Double the number of high schools offering kids a chance to train with the military in Junior ROTC. And experiment with "career academies," special little military schools within the schools, for "at-risk youth." Teach them "discipline and life skills." Keep them busy and off the streets.

At least that's the "Campaign Plan" of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) Cadet Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, dated July 1, 1993 - an unclassified but not widely known document that describes in detail the Army's plan for Junior ROTC Career Academies. The other services have similar plans.

Now that the Cold War is over, what's the military to do? At the Pentagon, no one really wants to downsize the services - or cut the budget much. Downsizing is taking place, though. Bases are closing, the middle-management ranks of officers are shrinking. College-level ROTC is becoming a shadow of its former self

But under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Les Aspin who, just before resigning, approved a plan for "nontraditional" military efforts, the armed services are moving into the high schools in a major way. They'll be counseling troubled teenagers and offering inner-city schools large grants to set up military academies.

Part of the program is simply a doubling of Junior ROTC, which has been with us for years. The current list of 1,500 high schools nationwide with Junior ROTC programs is slated to grow to 3,000 by the year 1997.

But another - more alarming - part would put the military in control of special programs in certain "target schools."

Each "target school" - the most recent list numbers thirty - will get, or already has, a "career academy." All students attending the academy sign up for Junior ROTC and take the standard military training offered to all high-school members of the corps. But they also spend the rest of their day together, taking their math and science, history and English, and vocational training, from military retirees who have spent at least twenty years in the armed forces and who are paid by the Department of Defense and the local school district. Other Federal funds for the career academies, some from defense reconversion funds and some from Education Department funds supposedly for educational demonstration projects, are administered by the Pentagon.

Only a handful of activists scattered around the country, in cities where the Pentagon has targeted a school, is paying attention. In many such cities, there is no opposition - or public awareness - at all.

If we're really interested in helping kids, why should we do it through the military?" asks Harold Jordan, coordinator of the National Youth and Militarism Program of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). I have a problem with the content of what is taught, the lack of control over instructors and curriculum, and the message it puts forth. We're trying to teach young people to make their own decisions and to resist peer pressure. The message the military sends out is how to follow orders, but not how to think for yourself."

What message is the military sending? An overt one is that Junior ROTC programs are not recruitment programs, that the Pentagon is strictly interested in helping problem kids get a decent education and a taste for disciplined living. The we are-not-recruiters" line has been standard for decades. But it takes on special importance now, when peace activists are demanding equal access to high-school students or are actually trying to ban military recruitment in the schools. Controversy is also growing over the amount of money spent on recruitment (officially $2 billion a year, plus untold amounts hidden in various nooks and crannies of the budget) at a time when the military is supposed to be downsizing.

The controversy stems as well from widespread fraud and malpractice by military recruiters. The General Accounting Office reported to Congress a couple of years ago that recruiting abuses were "systematic" in all four branches of the armed forces. The Congressional investigators found recruiters forging high-school diplomas and concealing criminal and medical records of recruits, enlisting undocumented immigrants, encouraging cheating by applicants on aptitude tests, and luring prospective enlistees with promises that could not be kept. And they found local units covering up such abuses as they investigated themselves.

Sticking to the dictum "nobody here but us educators" is key for purposes of public relations, which rationalizes the current push to get the military more involved in domestic affairs. Aside from simply giving the Pentagon something to do, the push attempts to cast the military in a favorable light.

Robert Goldich, a national-defense specialist at the Library of Congress, has pointed out, "If the military downsizes below a certain |critical mass,' which cannot be easily determined in advance, it may become invisible in the minds of a large segment of the population-potential recruits and their parents."

The armed forces may then, Goldich says, "wish to argue for force levels higher than those warranted by visible and foreseeable threats, on grounds ... of not letting the military as an institution shrink to the point of what might be called |social irrelevance.'"

Before I heard the Goldich theory, I spoke with Tod Ensign, director of Citizen Soldier, about the military career academies. He said he was reminded of an explanation offered him by an advertising executive who was developing TV recruitment ads just after the Pentagon turned to an all-volunteer Army, when the Gallup Poll was showing Americans' attitudes toward enlistment at an all-time low.

"The purpose of these ads," Ensign quotes the executive as saying, "isn't to make you rush out and do something. They're intended to make that |something' [enlistment] known to you and to bring it within the range of acceptable choices."

Ensign, author of the book Military Life: What You Should Know Before You Enlist!, suggests that the expansion of Junior ROTC and establishment of career academies now under way serves this purpose: "acceptability" of the military or, in Goldich's terms, prevention of "social irrelevance."

Aside from the reasons for expansion laid out in the Campaign Plan already cited, the Pentagon also invokes its support of "America 2000," the education improvement strategy developed at President George Bush's "education summit" held in Virginia in 1989 and chaired by then-Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas.

"What seems to work in successful schools is parent-teacher involvement and, to a large extent, community involvement with the schools," says Albert Arrighi, project officer for the Air Force's America 2000 activities, which include not only its career academies but also "getting the [Air Force] base public behind the public-school system."

This is important, Arrighi continues, "because [the Air Force] thinks the success of America 2000 may depend a great deal on the military."

The program's goals, while lofty, are laughably so. Goals for the year 2000 - only six years away, remember - include:

[paragraph] Every adult American will be literate.

[paragraph] All children in America will start school ready to learn.

[paragraph] Every school in America will be free of drugs and violence.

But even so, Sergeant David Masko of the Air Force News Service offers two examples of how the Air Force plans to help: Personnel at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska are "working to improve their preschool program so children can get a better head start at education," and the supply squadron at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii is working to "beautify the school grounds."

Once again, what this amounts to is public relations - getting the military into a public school, doing some unmilitary thing. And while the supply squadron may do a perfectly fine job of beautifying the school grounds, since when does the Air Force know how to run a preschool? And since when did we want it to try?

The claim that these programs are not about recruitment, are not meant to predispose kids toward the notion that the military life is the great life, is simply a lie.

Certainly, the armed forces are cutting back on the officer corps - dismissing not only those already in mid-career but also those in college-level ROTC programs that are supposed to lead to an officer's commission at graduation. Such ROTC programs have shrunk in recent years-by 50 per cent for the Navy, 65 per cent for the Air Force, and 30 per cent for the Army. But the services still need cannon fodder, and kids who are "not college material" are the best pool from which to recruit enlisted men and women.

Each year, the Pentagon conducts the Youth Attitude Tracking Study, a telephone-interview survey of about 10,000 young men and women of high-school age. In 1990, the analysts began to notice what they considered an alarming trend: a dramatic falloff in the propensity to enlist" among young black men. By last year, this trend had spread to all ethnic groups, across the board. ("Enlistment propensity," the researchers say, "is reported as the percentage of youth who indicate they would |definitely' or |probably' enlist in the next few years.")

It's easy to see why Harold Jordan of the AFSC thinks a major reason for the expansion of military programs in the high schools is an attempt to reverse this demographic trend. After all, kids who participate in Junior ROTC during high school are much more likely than their classmates to enlist.

Tod Ensign of Citizen Soldier, whose work within high schools has primarily involved looking into recruitment efforts, also is skeptical of claims that the career academies have nothing to do with recruitment. And he doubts the Pentagon's claims that these efforts are designed to give counseling and discipline and life skills to "troubled teens." Yes, the targeted schools are in inner cities, but he suggests they'll do just what the recruiters have always done.

Based on his experience with a Citizen Soldier video crew taping inside one of New York City's Military Entrance Processing Stations, where recruiters "process" high-school kids, Ensign says the recruiters are only interested in "creaming the population" of the school. "They want nothing to do," he says, "with the average fucked-up kid because they know they'll have no chance to qualify him or her for the service."

And that's sad, he continues. Even though the military pushes itself in such schools as these kids' only option for getting a decent life - to serve their term and then take the college scholarship - it isn't true. As one counselor put it, "These are the handful of kids in this school who do have a chance to go to college right away with scholarship aid."

The Pentagon is sending another message, and it is more real than "we are not recruiting." It's contained in the "expressed purpose" of Junior ROTC: "to instill military values and culture into the minds of youth."

The AFSC's Harold Jordan has raised concerns about the curriculum of both the regular ROTC program and the new career academies. Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, is heading a study whose preliminary findings show, to no one's surprise, that the texts used for Junior ROTC are more pro-military than other schoolbooks.

Also concerned is Tahan Jones, an AFSC staff member in Oakland and former Marine who resisted deployment to the Persian Gulf three years ago. Jones shared a copy of the textbook used for "leadership education and training" at Balboa High School in San Francisco - a high school that last fall accepted a grant of more than a half-million dollars to begin one of the pilot Army career academies.

The text includes readings and exercises in Nineteenth Century history which offers cadets such insights as these:

On the subject of the Indians and settlement of the West: "When the Civil War broke out, the regular soldiers were withdrawn from the West.... No longer facing an organized military force, the Indians began to terrorize the increasing number of white settlers.... Much of the work of the Army in defeating the Indians and pushing them farther west was undone....

"At the close of the Civil War, after the large Union forces were disbanded, a small regular Army was given the task of pacifying the Indians [bold text in original, signifying that "pacifying" is a "key word"] .... Fortunately for the Army, the government policy of pushing the Indians farther west then wiping them out was carried out successfully."

Cadets are also informed that "settling labor disputes" was an honorable Nineteenth Century occupation of the Army - "One of the most well-known instances," the text informs the reader, "was when the Army put an end to the railroad strike of 1894."

And then there's the lesson to be learned from U.S. participation in putting down the Boxer Rebellion in China of 1900. The Boxers, Chinese nationalists besieging the foreign imperialist powers trying to take over their country, were quickly repelled by a large international force consisting of troops from several European nations, Japan, and the United States. What today's high-school cadets are expected to learn from the Boxer Rebellion is: "It showed the world that the United States could and would protect its citizens if the were threatened anywhere in the world."

Robert Goldich, the Library of Congress researcher, has discussed the differences between a citizen's militia and a force like the Roman legions of classical times, a military caste of professionals.

"In early 1992," he wrote at that time, "it appears that the U.S. Armed Forces may indeed be becoming a force of legions and legionaries, tasked with maintaining frontiers and influence, against incursions inimical to American interests and security worldwide."

The career academy plan, with its promise that the thirty schools now on the target list are only a pilot project, with its cooptation of Education Department funds intended for demonstration projects, looks a lot like an attempt to create a military class whose indoctrination begins in the ninth grade.

It's nice to know that after a twelve-year period of wandering in the wilderness, as the Reagan and Bush Administrations dismantled what was left of Federal aid to education, the Government is ready to acknowledge renewed responsibility to the public schools. But what evidence is there - other than rhetorical remarks by Pentagon officials, school officials, and citizens who think a heavy dose of "discipline" is what "troubled teens" need - that the military establishment is equipped to save the schools"?

There's no question, as Harold Jordan says, that he wants the military out of the schools, but he also adds: "In the process of struggling for that, I want for more parents, teachers, and students to take an interest in what goes on in their schools and to become activists and to become advocates for improvements in education and for improved funding in education."

For this, we need citizens - not soldiers.