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BOOK REVIEW: “Yes, Sir!” — Turning Students into Soldiers

  By Seth Kershner, Scott Harding, and Charles Howlett
  (University of Georgia Press, 2022)
  204 pp.

  español -

Winter 2023 - 2024 / Sylvia McGauley / Rethinking Schools Teenagers mount the army tank, shyly at first and then more boldly when they realize no one is stopping them. Soon more than half a dozen kids vie for space. Someone climbs to the top, takes the helm, and begins steering the turret and pointing the tank’s main gun, aiming it. A girl takes over, her red hair flying, and then someone else. Nearby students climb into a Humvee from the Iraq War. From the back of a jeep, a youngish military vet pulls out fatigues, a flak jacket, and helmet, which he quietly hands to a gangly teenage boy who slowly dons the uniform and stands up tall. Moments later, the same vet emerges with a heavy shoulder mounted grenade launcher that he passes to a small boy who smiles broadly. The vet assists him in balancing and pointing the big gun. Dozens of students gather round, and they pass the weapon one to another. Each takes a turn aiming at other kids. Then I see Alex, my student who an hour before had exploded with rage at an education system that has failed him and a family that cannot support him. He aims the weighty gun at me and says “Pow.” 

It was “Living History Day” at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, a working-class suburb of Portland, Oregon, in November 2016. At that annual event, our administration and the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) hijacked our schedule and curriculum so that our 2,800 students could hear presentations by more than 300 military veterans. This embrace of militarism is not unique to Reynolds High School. Schools throughout the country organize Veterans Day programs such as Reynolds’ Living History Day. 

Seth Kershner, Scott Harding, and Charles Howlett in their thoughtful, well-researched book, Breaking the War Habit: The Debate over Militarism in American Education, demonstrate how the military presence in schools today has become a pervasive normalized element in the educational landscape. According to the authors, 3,500 public high schools, one in six, have a JROTC unit. In the Southeast, JROTC is present in 30 to 60 percent of public high schools. Even some middle schools boast military-based “leadership programs.” The Pentagon continues to promote the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) as a career aptitude exam, even though the military developed it as a recruitment tool. Military recruiters regularly visit high schools, targeting students primarily from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and students of color. In 2013, Congress instructed the secretary of defense to expand further and to report on “efforts to increase distribution of units in educationally and economically deprived areas.” 

Counter-Recruitment and the Campaign to Demilitarize Public Schools

Scott Harding, Seth Kershner -

ISBN 9781137515254
Publication Date September 2015
Formats Hardcover Ebook (EPUB) Ebook (PDF)
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan

Counter-Recruitment and the Campaign to Demilitarize Public Schools"This book brilliantly dissects not only the militarization of schools in the United States but also offers a systemic approach to forms of counter-recruitment. Not content to simply condemn military recruitment of students, the book offers parents and others a ray of hope in developing a language, strategies, and policies that can end this pernicious militarizing of schools and the recruitment of young people into America's ever expanding war machine. A must-read book for fighting back against militarized pedagogies and strategies of repression." - Henry Giroux, McMaster University, Canada, author of The Violence of Organized Forgetting (2013)

"What does sustainable anti-militarization look like? Who does it—and how? This fascinating book pulls back two curtains, first on how American high schools are being steadily militarized, and second, on how thoughtful, committed local counter-recruitment activists are rolling back that militarizing process, school by school, town by town. For any of us in critical security studies, American studies, peace studies, education, or women's and gender studies, this is a genuinely valuable book." - Cynthia Enloe, author of Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (2010)

The United States is one of the only developed countries to allow a military presence in public schools, including an active role for military recruiters. In order to enlist 250,000 new recruits every year, the US military must market itself to youth by integrating itself into schools through programs such as JROTC (Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps), and spend billions of dollars annually on recruitment activities. This militarization of educational space has spawned a little-noticed grassroots resistance: the small, but sophisticated, "counter-recruitment" movement. This book describes the various tactics used in counter-recruitment, drawing from the words of activists and case studies of successful organizing and advocacy. Counter-recruiters visit schools to challenge recruiters' messages with information on non-military career options; activists work to make it harder for the military to operate in public schools; they conduct lobbying campaigns for policies that protect students' private information from military recruiters; and, counter-recruiters mentor youth to become involved in these activities. While attracting little attention, counter-recruitment has nonetheless been described as "the military recruiter's greatest obstacle" by a Marine Corps official.

Source: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137493279


Scott Harding is Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the School of Social Work, University of Connecticut, USA. He has extensive advocacy and organizing experience on issues of homelessness, affordable housing, welfare, community development, and transnational labor solidarity. He was Executive Director and Policy Coordinator for the California Homeless & Housing Coalition, USA. He is a Board Member of Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS), and former Editor of The Journal of Community Practice.

Seth Kershner is an independent writer and researcher whose primary focus is the US military's growing presence in public schools. His work has appeared in a number of academic journals and books, as well as popular outlets such as In These Times, Rethinking Schools, and Sojourners, among others. Kershner currently works as a reference librarian at Northwestern Connecticut Community College, USA.

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Henry Giroux | Beyond Neoliberal Miseducation

Henry Giroux -

This article draws from a number of ideas in Henry A. Giroux's newest book, Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education.

As universities turn toward corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor while expanding the ranks of their managerial class. Modeled after a savage neoliberal value system in which wealth and power are redistributed upward, a market-oriented class of managers largely has taken over the governing structures of most institutions of higher education in the United States. As Debra Leigh Scott points out, "administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the country."1


Under the regime of neoliberal education, misery breeds a combination of contempt and source of profits for the banks and other financial industries.


There is more at stake here than metrics. Benjamin Ginsberg views this shift in governance as the rise of what he calls ominously the "the all administrative university," noting that it does not bode well for any notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere.2A number of colleges and universities are drawing more and more upon adjunct and nontenured faculty - whose ranks now constitute 1 million out of 1.5 million faculty - many of whom occupy the status of indentured servants who are overworked, lack benefits, receive little or no administrative support and are paid salaries that increasingly qualify them for food stamps.3

Many students increasingly fare no better in sharing the status of a subaltern class beholden to neoliberal policies and values, and largely treated as consumers for whom education has become little more than a service. Too many students are buried under huge debts that have become a major source of celebration by the collection industry because it allows them to cash in on the misfortune and hardships of an army of indebted students. Under the regime of neoliberal education, misery breeds a combination of contempt and source of profits for the banks and other financial industries. Jerry Aston, a member of that industry, wrote in a column after witnessing a protest rally by students criticizing their mounting debt that he "couldn't believe the accumulated wealth they represent - for our industry."4 And, of course, this type of economic injustice is taking place in an economy in which rich plutocrats such as the infamous union-busting Koch brothers each saw "their investments grow by $6 billion in one year, which amounts to three million dollars per hour based on a 40-hour 'work' week."5 One astounding figure of greed and concentrated power is revealed in the fact that in 2012, the Koch brothers "made enough money in one second to feed one homeless woman for an entire year."6 Workers, students, youths and the poor are all considered expendable this neoliberal global economy. Yet the one institution, education, that offers the opportunities for students to challenge these anti-democratic tendencies is under attack in ways that are unparalleled, at least in terms of the scope and intensity of the assault by the corporate elite and other economic fundamentalists.

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