Educational \u201cculture wars\u201d overlook the ways in which war has altered what we teach our kids.
\nDuring a Veterans Day celebration in my small Maryland community, a teacher clicked through a slideshow of smiling men and women in military uniforms. \u201cGirls and boys, can anyone tell me what courage is?\u201d she asked the crowd, mostly children from local elementary schools, including my two young kids.
\nA boy raised his hand. \u201cNot being scared?\u201d he asked.
\nThe teacher seized on his response: \u201cYes!\u201d she exclaimed. \u201cNot being scared.\u201d She proceeded to discuss this country\u2019s 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 \u2014 fear \u2014 in the service of armed violence.
\nNo mention was made of what war can do to those fighting it, not to speak of civilians caught in the crossfire, and how much money has left our country\u2019s shores thanks to armed conflict. That\u2019s especially true, given the scores of U.S.-led military operations still playing out globally as the Pentagon arms and trains local troops, runs intelligence operations, and conducts military exercises.
\nThat week, my children and others in schools across the county spent hours in their classrooms celebrating Veterans Day through a range of activities meant to honor our armed forces. My kindergartener typically made a paper crown, with six colorful peaks for the six branches of service, that framed her little face. Kids in older grades wrote letters to soldiers thanking them for their service.
\nI have no doubt that if such schoolchildren were ever shown photos in class of what war actually does to kids their age, including of dead and wounded elementary school students and their parents and grandparents in Afghanistan and Iraq, there would be an uproar. And there would be another, of course, if they were told that \u201ctheir\u201d troops were more likely to be attacked (as in sexually assaulted) by one of their compatriots than by any imaginable enemy. I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, one of the most progressive and highly educated counties in the country and even here, war, American-style, is painted as a sanitized event full of muscular young people, their emotions under control (until, of course, they aren\u2019t).
\nEven here, few parents and teachers dare talk to young children about the atrocities committed by our military in our wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan.
\nOur Culture of Violence
\nI suspect that we don\u2019t talk about war anymore or consider its still-reverberating consequences exactly because it still remains only half-visible everywhere in our all-American world. Nonetheless, armed violence over the more than two decades since the start of the disastrous post-9\/11 \u201cwar on terror\u201d has percolated, however indirectly, into what seems like just about every aspect of this country\u2019s being \u2014 from violent video games to still-spiking mass shootings to local police forces armed with weapons of war (thanks to the Pentagon!) as if they were being sent on raids to kill Osama bin Laden.
\nAs a society, it seems to me that we\u2019ve come to view violence rather than other ways of solving problems (including critical thinking and honest conversation) as the new normal, however little we may admit to that reality. Have any of our leaders, for instance, seriously explored alternative responses to Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine \u2014 other, that is, than sending endless billions of dollars in arms to that country? Had we exhibited foresight \u2014 Russian designs on Ukraine were known for years \u2014 our government could have been working on a green-energy plan to help starve President Vladimir Putin from his post as war-criminal-in-chief long ago.
\nAnd mind you, there\u2019s no need to look thousands of miles away to find people openly sanctioning fighting as a form of governance. After all, a significant number of Americans thought it was perfectly acceptable to use a violent coup to dispute the outcome of the last presidential election.
\nAs anyone involved in school affairs has noticed by now, you don\u2019t have to look far to notice an urge to do violence. It\u2019s now remarkably common for school board members and educators to face threats from parents when they try to deal with topics as basic and fundamental to our humanity as gender identities falling outside of cisgender \u201cboy\u201d or \u201cgirl,\u201d or non-heterosexual relationships.
\nJust recently, I even found myself normalizing violence in my own fashion. As a friend\u2019s transgender teen described a recent LGBTQ+ pride march in his community, that\u2019s what immediately came to mind and so I asked, \u201cWere there any angry protesters?\u201d I was, of course, imagining armed militia members and the like, who have indeed appeared at similar marches around the country in recent years.
\nThe kid looked at me with confusion. \u201cYou mean bigots?\u201d he asked. I nodded and apologized. When did I start thinking of peaceful self-expression as an automatic provocation to violence? I suspect that violence has become so commonplace in our culture that such assumptions are now second nature for many of us.
\nThe Underbelly of Relentless War
\nMost of the time though, I do notice that reality because I\u2019m part of a culture that helps normalize it. I\u2019m a military spouse of 10 years and counting and I\u2019ve enlisted my creativity, time, and money in figuring out how to move every two or three years with my young family as the Pentagon shuttles us from duty station to duty station. And I do, of course, benefit from the financial stability offered by a salary paid by a Department of Defense whose congressional monies go through the roof year after year.
\nShortly before I met my husband in 2011, along with a group of social scientists at Brown University\u2019s Watson Institute for International Studies, I co-founded the Costs of War Project. A multidisciplinary think tank, it now consists of more than 35 scholars, medical doctors, activists, and journalists who continue to document the never-ending costs of the U.S. decision to respond to the September 11, 2001, attacks by invading Afghanistan and then Iraq, while launching a global \u201cwar on terror\u201d that spread across South Asia, the Greater Middle East, and Africa, and has yet to end.
\nWhile working on that project, I was struck by seldom-noticed ways that the war on terror continued to reverberate here at home. In that not-so-obvious category, for instance, were the things that simply didn\u2019t get done here because of the time, energy, and taxpayer dollars (an estimated $8 trillion by the end of 2022) that have been swallowed up by our foreign wars. There were the roads and schools that didn\u2019t get repaired or built, the teachers who didn\u2019t get hired, and most notably (when I think about schools) the humanities classes that might have been but weren\u2019t funded.
\nToday, when culture wars focused on our education system hit the headlines, it\u2019s striking how little we talk about the ways war has altered what we teach our kids. As a start (and don\u2019t be shocked!), in the years immediately after 9\/11, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the third largest source of funding for research at American universities. The DOD and other military-related agencies like the Department of Homeland Security established laboratories and research centers at staggering numbers of (mostly state) universities to fund research into weapons and armor, military strategy, bioterrorism prevention, and intelligence-gathering.
\nAnd such military funding of university research only continues today, often \u2014 if you\u2019ll excuse my using the word \u2014 trumping funding for human service-related fields. For example, the Pentagon invested $130.1 billion in university research centers in 2022. Compare that with the $353 million in funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for university-based research into developing more equitable and affordable healthcare and you\u2019ll know what we as a nation value most. Only $100 million went into university research aimed at improving educational outcomes. In other words, you don\u2019t have to dig too deeply to grasp just where our national priorities lie.
\nForced Military Coursework for Poor Teens
\nStill, I was unprepared when I recently read in the New York Times that the Pentagon, in collaboration with public high schools around the country, had started to force thousands of young teens in poor and minority communities into Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) classes without their consent. Those students are required to wear uniforms and obey orders from teachers. In one case, an instructor manhandled a \u201crecruit.\u201d Others have been yelled at, and some who didn\u2019t want to be in JROTC were intimidated or simply barred from dropping the course.
\nAs the Times reporters discovered, textbooks in these courses focus on ways in which government and military actions have benefited Americans from the dominant culture at the expense of people of color. For example, according to that report, one Marine Corps JROTC textbook discusses the Trail of Tears of the 1830s \u2014 the forced relocation of Native-American populations from their lands in the southeastern U.S. all the way across the Mississippi to present-day Oklahoma \u2014 without even bothering to mention the thousands of who died along the way.
\nOf course, such forced enlistment of children in the military is only possible thanks to the lack of resources kids from wealthier communities like my own take for granted. Several schools profiled in the Times enrolled students in JROTC because they couldn\u2019t hire enough teachers. One Oklahoma high school, for instance, reported that all freshmen were enrolled in JROTC courses because it didn\u2019t have enough physical-education teachers. It\u2019s a bitter example of how war has come full circle in this country, as students lacking PE teachers are channeled into the same war-making machine that helped cause such deficits in the first place.
\nTo be sure, a couple of teachers I\u2019ve spoken to who live in heavily military communities view the idea of such mandatory service as an opportunity to build leadership skills, discipline, and good study habits in young people who may otherwise lack structure in their lives. But it says something about our moment that kids can\u2019t enroll in programs reminiscent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s Civilian Conservation Corps as an alternate pathway to public service and ideally (if taxpayers were willing), higher education. To echo the late physician-activist Paul Farmer in his moving profile of a family of Haitian refugees helped to gain their footing here through military enlistment, war eerily creates opportunities for poor and vulnerable families, even if the final prospects may be grim indeed.
\nThe Hidden Costs
\nThe costs of funneling kids into military careers are profound. International human rights law defines the minimum age for recruiting children into armed conflict as 18 and the International Criminal Court goes further, designating the recruitment of kids aged 14 or younger a war crime. At such an age, the connections between the parts of the brain that feel and think have yet to fully develop, making it more likely that they\u2019ll act on fear, excitement, or some other overpowering emotion rather than rationally facing such decisions. (Though if kids learn to acknowledge those very emotions, that can at least help them somewhat in controlling their impulsive reactions.) In turn, trauma, which people who enter the military are more likely to experience than civilians, further stunts the ability to think critically.
\nTeenagers are also still forming a sense of identity vis-\u00e0-vis their peers and adult figures who (ideally) reflect their strengths and preferences back to them via praise, constructive criticism, and encouragement. A militarized curriculum runs counter to such an expansive view of human development.
\nOn that note, I\u2019m proud to say that my local school district is indeed trying to develop children\u2019s worldviews in other ways. Recently, for example, our district introduced a modest collection of books to school classrooms and libraries with characters who are nonbinary, queer, transgender, gay, or lesbian. In a similar fashion, it\u2019s collaborating with a local Jewish cultural organization to help students deal with both anti-Semitism and racism.
\nI\u2019m sure you won\u2019t be surprised to learn that even my community has witnessed some resistance, however mild, to the LGBTQ+ awareness project. A couple of parents raised their hands at information meetings, asking about the new readings with questions like, \u201cIf I had a friend who wanted to opt her kids out of this, could she?\u201d As you may suspect, when it comes to subject matter about inclusion and openness to difference rather than militarism, heterosexuality, and conformity, the answer is still always: yes.<\/p>\n
Truthout<\/p>\n
Tags;Children<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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