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NNOMY News 1066: First Quarter 2023
Forced JROTC on the Nation's Poorer Students

Hello ,

A series of articles from the New York Times from the summer of 2022 up to the winter of 2022 - 2023 has led to much national and regional press on the issue of Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps abuses in our national public school system of the United States. Those NYC articles, in turn, led to a handful of senators and congress members establishing a congressional investigative committee to call up the Pentagon to answer to student sexual abuse claims against JROTC instructors in their JROTC units. 

Other issues also included militarized curriculum in JROTC textbooks, National Rifle Association support for shooting ranges in high schools and most pronouncedly the increasing mandatory placement of freshman students into JROTC corps as a replacement for physical education classes in poorer communities that lack other opportunities, post high school, like college. 

While Counter-recruiters had successfully challenged and overturned mandatory JROTC in the Chicago Public School district after a multi year lobbying effort of the district, other schools nationally have been adopting forced placements of students without parental or student consent while the Pentagon asserts that the program is voluntary.  With lagging military recruitment for military recruiters having to face systemic changes in the recruiting environment post COVID-19, it is clear that that these mandatory school placements are a strategy to increase military recruitment in the commons of our public schools, with a coercive approach sidestepping national and state laws restricting such demands on our nation’s most vulnerable families and violating basic human rights.

Below are a specific selection of articles that have occurred in the intervening 9 months addressing the concerns and struggle around maintaining a citizen based educational commons and even an article from over seventy years ago where the University of California was facing .the question of forced ROTC upon college students receiving an education at a state sponsored school.

#counter-recruitment | #nnomypeace | #peacefulcareers | #demilitarize |  www.nnomy.org

Thousands of Teens Are Being Pushed Into Military’s Junior R.O.T.C. e

December 11, 2022 / Mike Baker, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Ilana Marcus / New York Times - On her first day of high school, Andreya Thomas looked over her schedule and found that she was enrolled in a class with an unfamiliar name: J.R.O.T.C.

She and other freshmen at Pershing High School in Detroit soon learned that they had been placed into the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, a program funded by the U.S. military designed to teach leadership skills, discipline and civic values — and open students’ eyes to the idea of a military career. In the class, students had to wear military uniforms and obey orders from an instructor who was often yelling, Ms. Thomas said, but when several of them pleaded to be allowed to drop the class, school administrators refused.

“They told us it was mandatory,” Ms. Thomas said.

J.R.O.T.C. programs, taught by military veterans at some 3,500 high schools across the country, are supposed to be elective, and the Pentagon has said that requiring students to take them goes against its guidelines. But The New York Times found that thousands of public school students were being funneled into the classes without ever having chosen them, either as an explicit requirement or by being automatically enrolled.

NOTE: See all the NYT articles HERE

Mandatory military instruction affects Black and Latino high school students most frequently, report says

December 18, 2022 / Rikki Klaus / CNN -  When high school student Trevor Reed was automatically enrolled in a Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) class in 2020, both he and his mother objected.

“We don’t have to look far outside of our family to see the effect that the military has, especially when you have to go off to war. And so that’s something my son never really wanted to do,” Tineeka Reed told CNN.

So, the Chicago mother sent multiple emails to the instructor of the Department of Defense-sponsored youth military program and the principal at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. College Preparatory High School, offering an alternative. She suggested her son Trevor, 17, could enroll in an online class that would meet the required health credit. But the message Reed told CNN she heard from school administration was, “it’s either our way or the highway, or he don’t graduate.”

 
JROTC Is Preying on Poor Students

Jan 08, 2023 / Seth Kershner, Scott Harding / Jacobin - The Pentagon’s signature program for instilling military values in American schools, the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC), has a long history dating to 1916. But it hasn’t endured such bad press since the 1970s. In several damning articles, the New York Times revealed the structure of what’s wrong with high school military training: instructors who use their positions to prey on teenage girls, in-school shooting ranges built with grants from the National Rifle Association, and mandatory enrollment in some of the nation’s largest school districts — all abetted by school officials who fail to adequately monitor a program of such dubious educational value that many instructors lack a college degree.

These revelations have vindicated those in the “counter-recruitment” movement who for years warned of a largely unsupervised program taught by retired military officers. It also raises serious questions about why military training programs have any place in US public high schools.

Congress Expands Scrutiny of Junior R.O.T.C. Programs

Feb. 2, 2023 / Mike Baker, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs / New York Times - Senators said they were “disturbed” by reports that schools were automatically enrolling students into the military program. Lawmakers are also examining other issues.  Congressional leaders have expanded their scrutiny of the military’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, asking for information about the program’s enrollment practices, curriculum and sponsor relationships with the National Rifle Association. In a letter sent this week to the Pentagon and Department of Education, four senators said they were “disturbed” by a New York Times article that detailed how some high schools were automatically placing freshmen into the military-sponsored programs at public high schools, at times over the objections of the students or their parents.

 
David Harris and the politics of draft resistance

February 23, 2023 / Edward Hasbrouck / wagingnonviolence.org - David Harris, who died earlier this month at the age of 76, was a charismatic media figure and became a figurehead of draft resistance. In that light, perhaps it is understandable that when he is spoken of today, even by people sympathetic to draft resistance, he is often used as a symbolic blank state onto which people project their own feelings about draft resistance — more than as a springboard for engaging with what he said. But that’s unfortunate, given that he wrote so eloquently and prolifically about the ideas underlying his draft resistance actions.

For the last three years, I’ve been working on a review of the memoirs of draft resisters in the U.S. during the U.S. war in Vietnam. I’ve tracked down published book length first-person narratives by more than 40 draft resisters from this cohort, including writings by David Harris from the 1960s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Harris left one of the most extensive bodies of exposition and analysis of the motives, meaning and significance of draft resistance of anyone to date in U.S. history.

 
Freshman JROTC enrollment plunges after overhaul by Chicago Public Schools

0an 5, 2023 / Alex Ruppenthal / Chicago Sun Times - Freshman enrollment in a controversial military-run training program plummeted this academic year at some Chicago high schools after district leaders cracked down on schools that were effectively forcing first-year students to participate, according to a report from the district’s watchdog released Thursday.

Chicago Public Schools pledged last spring to end automatic enrollment in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, a daily class on military science and leadership taught by retired military officers.

 
AI Explains About Opposition to JROTC

March 5, 2023 / Author / Source - JROTC stands for Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, a program that is designed to provide high school students with leadership skills and prepare them for a possible future career in the military. While some people support JROTC, others are opposed to it for various reasons.

One of the primary reasons why people oppose JROTC is because they believe that it glorifies war and violence. They argue that the program encourages young people to view military service as the only viable career option, rather than pursuing other paths such as higher education or vocational training.

 
Our Children Are Experiencing Militarization of the US Up Close and Personally

February 23, 2023 / Andrea Mazzarino / Truthout - During a Veterans Day celebration in my small Maryland community, a teacher clicked through a slideshow of smiling men and women in military uniforms. “Girls and boys, can anyone tell me what courage is?” she asked the crowd, mostly children from local elementary schools, including my two young kids.

A boy raised his hand. “Not being scared?” he asked.

The teacher seized on his response: “Yes!” she exclaimed. “Not being scared.” She proceeded to discuss this country’s armed forces, highlighting how brave U.S. troops are because they fight to defend our way of life. Servicemembers and veterans in the crowd were encouraged to stand. My own children beamed, knowing that their father is just such a military officer. The veterans and troops present did indeed stand, but most of them stared at the ground. As a counselor who works with children, including those from local military families, I marveled that the teacher was asking the young audience to dismiss one of the most vulnerable emotions there is — fear — in the service of armed violence.

The Political Economy of Systemic U.S. Militarism

Apr 01, 2022 / James M. Cypher / Monthly Review - From the Second World War on, the populace fell into line embracing what C. Wright Mills called the “American celebration.” Acceding to the “military definition of reality,” the public at large vicariously celebrates unipolar might at every turn—yet this now falters too, in the context of people’s dwindling level of internal morale as the ravages of neoliberalism have mercilessly widened the distribution of income. Real median hourly wages grew at the minuscule annual rate of 0.34 percent from 1979 to 2019, while hourly worker productivity rose 1.33 percent per year. Nevertheless, led by today’s “crackpot realists” (namely, the “defense intellectuals”) fired by the “military metaphysic”—as Mills again put it—the drums now beat for U.S. military encirclement and policies to constrain China. Flexing its seapower and flaunting its dominance in space (“integrated deterrence”), the U.S. national security state is once again using “threat inflation” to ensure that people readily fall into line. From the Second World War to the present, we can identify three defining, overlapping configurations of U.S. militarism....