William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois – Chicago, has co-written this article on his website that discusses a disquieting piece of information. The City of Chicago has over 10,000 students participating in Junior ROTC programs and over 1,000 students enrolled at one of five different military high schools in the city. Chicago’s public school system is the most militarized in the entire United States, but the idea of military public schools first emerged in Oakland, CA in 2000 when then-mayor Jerry Brown proposed a military magnet school. Similar programs exist in Philadelphia and Atlanta. The idea of bringing military discipline to urban high schools has been touted as a “no-nonsense” approach to restoring order into unmanageable classrooms and to provide college-preparatory-level education, but the statistics tracking college enrollment from Chicago’s military schools show rather uneven results.
Of concern to many critics is that these programs are disproportionately focused on replacing high schools that served black and immigrant neighborhoods. In the Chicago area, there are no military schools in any white community or suburb. The criticism is two-fold: one, that the use of military programs creates a de-facto two-tiered system of education based almost solely on race, and two, that the Department of Defense (which provides significant funding for the military schools and JROTC programs) is using the opportunity as a method of recruiting at a time when overall recruitment goals are not being met.
Ayers, et. al., take the criticism a step further and argue that militarized public schools are not only discriminatory, they promote a culture of obedience and conformity. Public schools, they argue, exist in a democracy to provide students with the opportunity to develop critical and independent thinking and to be exposed to a variety of ideas. The nature of military training is just the opposite — to drill cadets into compliance with orders, to act as units, and to follow strict discipline that rejects any questioning. They point out that during both WWI and WWII there was public debate about militarizing American high schools, but the idea was ultimately rejected by the federal government as unnecessary.
What goes unsaid in Professor Ayers’ article, but as subtext is loud and clear, is that this phenomenon is also part of a larger trend toward institutionalizing elements of fascism in American life. The well-known 2003 article “14 Characteristics Of Fascism” by Lawrence Britt identifies many common elements that existed in various Fascist states ranging from Nazi Germany to Suharto’s Indonesia to Pinochet’s Chile, and sadly far too many of them can be readily demonstrated as alive and well in George Bush’s America; fetishizing the military is a prime hallmark of fascist states, and since 2001 the idealization of the military has skyrocketed in our culture. Compelling young people to open identify with the active military by instilling the military’s own systems of discipline and training furthers the goal of maintaining high approval for the military establishment. Moreover, co-opting youth as ideological warriors transcends merely fascism and is a well-established mechanism of authoritarian governments of all stripes: the Hitler Youth, the Young Pioneers of the Soviet Union and the youth gangs of Mao’s Cultural Revolution were all state-sponsored groups utilizing elements of militarization to produce compliant political cadres outside of the formal militaries themselves that could be used for a variety of ideological purposes.
Proto-fascist sentiment has long been a part of the American national character, and the resurgence of extreme nationalism in the last several years, along with the constant and unchecked anti-democratic abuses of power by the Bush Administration, should give anyone but the most blindly-partisan right-wingers pause to consider how close we are to being transformed into a fascist nation. Using a variety of rationalizations for informally drafting and co-opting underprivileged members of our society into serving questionable politico-military ends should not be getting a free pass.
(Thanks to Jessica at Beacon Broadside for the link to Ayers’ article)
