Opinion / 2/21/2022 / Gary Ghirardi - Under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), public high schools must give the names, addresses and telephone numbers of students to military recruiters, college/university recruiters and prospective employers if the recruiters request the information (ESSA, Title VIII, 8528). However, students or their parents have the right to instruct the school in writing that this information is not to be released.
But the parents are challenged in their ability to protect their children from all the ways that twenty-first century US American culture has to form their children’s political consciousness with its myriad conveyances of propaganda through a compliant militarized media, constant and expanding violent entertainment offerings, and an educational system that allows Pentagon programs inside public schools to instill a military ethos in their development.
In February of 2022, in the midst of a now endemic viral pandemic, the US appears to be on the cusp of a US / Russian conflict in Ukraine extending a long time civil war into a potentially lethal outcome for millions of people, and the world itself, if it morphs into a nuclear conflagration.