Militarism goes to school

Schools are a primary site for socialization into societies that support war, and the United States is no exception. The tradition of military recruiters visiting high schools is deeply ingrained in the United States, with many schools logging visits from the military every second or third day school is in session (Harding & Kershner 2018, 326). “Military science” classes, with instructor salaries split between local school districts and the Pentagon, are now so prevalent that in 10 states one out of every three public high schools offers such instruction (Goldman et al. 2017). With the U.S. military’s presence in public schools expanding, and a leading policy think tank advocating for the establishment of yet more high school “military science” programs (Goldman et al. 2017), this special section is particularly timely.

The articles in this section engage with the question of the militarization of schools and of the lives of teenagers from a different perspective, shedding light on the processes by which societies are prepared for war through the militarization of the civilian educational system. Scholarly attention to the militarization of American schools has been increasing in recent years. Drawing on fieldwork at a California high school, Abajian (2013, ii) described a pervasive ‘web of militarism’ in public schools: omnipresent military recruiters, the paramilitary Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program, and career guidance offices filled with brochures promoting the armed forces. In ‘privileging military values’ and giving military careers ‘unparalleled promotion in comparison to other postsecondary’ career paths, Abajian found that many U.S. schools effectively create a ‘school-to-military pipeline.’

These findings support the vision of U.S. military recruiting strategists. In their trade journals, planning documents, and training manuals, recruiters are urged to achieve ‘school ownership’ and to convert educational institutions into ‘forward operating bases’ from which they can more effectively launch ‘aggressive assaults’ on high school juniors – a demographic group considered by one high-ranking Marine Recruiting official to be the ‘future of the all-volunteer military’ (United States Army Recruiting Command 2006; Recruiter Journal, September 2008, 8; United States Army Recruiting Command, Chicago Recruiting Battalion 2014, 9; Long 2006, 8).

The extent to which these recruitment practices rely on infiltrating schools demonstrates the ‘fragile and contingent’ nature of the armed forces in late-capitalist societies (Enloe 2015, 6). ‘Militaries,’ according to Cynthia Enloe, ‘are not automatically raised or sustained, not easily mobilized or deployed’ (6). Indeed, the work of enlisting enough soldiers to maintain the U.S. military requires enormous human and financial resources. Consider that the Pentagon’s annual recruiting budget is approximately $1.4 billion, and that in 2009 the Associated Press estimated that there were 27,000 people employed in military recruiting, advertising and public relations – a workforce nearly as large as the U.S. State Department at that time (cited in McCartney and McCartney 2015, 21).

The human and financial resources devoted to military recruiting have spawned a dizzying array of military youth outreach initiatives. First, U.S. public schools face a federal mandate to allow recruiters access to all high school campuses. However, in reality these military personnel inundate some schools much more than others with their message. According to U.S. Army Recruiting Command data gained through the authors’ Freedom of Information Act requests, while high schools in wealthy suburban school districts typically restrict visits from recruiters to only two or three times a year, in some low-income urban communities the military is on campus two or three times a week (Harding and Kershner 2018, 326).

Besides recruiters’ physical presence in schools, other initiatives include the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), which was administered to over 700,000 U.S. high school students during the 2015–16 school year. The military claims it is performing a valuable public service by offering the test for free to schools as a vocational guidance tool. However, internal government documents reveal that the ASVAB test is a key element in the Pentagon’s recruiting strategy, as it allows the military to collect the kinds of data that will allow their recruiters to customize a sales pitch to students. Then there is the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program, a ‘military science’ curriculum present in approximately 3,500 American high schools. Funded with a mix of local school district funding and more than $380 million per year from the Department of Defense, the JROTC enrolls more than 500,000 students nationwide (Goldman et al. 2017). Students in JROTC receive academic credit for courses in military science, citizenship, ‘leadership education,’ as well as drill and marksmanship taught by uniformed, retired military officers.

Until recently, few scholars have addressed the growing connections and collaboration between the military and public education. Given that reverence for the military is deeply embedded within U.S. society (Lutz 2010), gaining critical distance sufficient to critique the military’s growing involvement in public education is difficult. As part of analyzing the increasingly blurred lines between these two realms in the United States, this special section aims to deepen understanding of how societies organize themselves for war and violence. By examining the interconnections between the armed forces and public schooling, we gain a better appreciation of the way that the military works with civilian educational institutions to produce future soldiers, sailors, and marines.

While not explicitly focused on schools, Matthew Eddy and Matthew Friesen (‘Selling the Service: Veteran Reflections on Military Recruitment’) widen the investigative lens by examining a primary dimension of school militarism: interactions with military recruiters. Eddy and Friesen draw on interviews they conducted with dozens of military veterans who described their own recruiters as similar to ‘used car salesman’: nearly half of the veterans said that military recruiters stretched the truth. This supports prior scholarship suggesting that recruiters emphasize the positive and omit negative or troubling aspects of military service (McGlynn and Lavariega-Monforti 2010).

In part because of such dishonest and high pressure recruiting tactics, the militarization of U.S. public education, far from being a uniform and inevitable process, is meeting resistance from both outside and within schools. ‘Queer Kinks and the Arc of Justice: Meditations on Failure and Persistence,’ by Erica Meiners and Therese Quinn, demonstrates how – as Basham and Bulmer suggest (2017, 67) – critical military studies can ‘prompt us to think in more complex ways about resisting war and militarism’ and avoid stultifying binaries like ‘militarization/demilitarization.’ Meiners and Quinn begin by assessing past failures in the movement to demilitarize Chicago public schools. A key lesson, they argue, is to avoid strategies that ‘rely on and naturalize the underlying logics of the military industrial complex.’ Instead, organizers seeking to challenge the militarism of educational settings should press radical demands. At the same time, Meiners and Quinn find, it is necessary and useful to reframe failure in different organizing efforts. To this end, the authors advocate another way of assessing struggles against school militarism. ‘Queering failure,’ the authors suggest, may help sustain activists for the long haul by recognizing that there ‘will always be kinks in the path and bends in the ‘arc of justice’.’

As Meiners and Quinn demonstrate, Public Military Academies (PMAs), just as with JROTC and other explicit instances of school militarism, are notoriously difficult to oppose because they are depicted in a positive manner: as offering vital educational choices for parents and students. Of import, then, is the contribution of Brooke Johnson, ‘The Erotic as Resistance: Heterogendered Resistance at a Military Charter School,’ which illustrates the less ideological, more subtle forms of resistance that can take place within PMAs. Johnson conducted extended fieldwork at a military-style charter school in California where students followed daily procedures similar to PMAs in Chicago and elsewhere. Interestingly, opposition to militarism at this school came mainly from LGBTQ youth. Relying on Audre Lorde’s (1984) notion of the erotic as a source of opposition, Johnson proposes that by engaging in same-sex dancing and chasing games, and adopting unabashedly ‘queer public personas,’ students affirmed their opposition to the school’s promotion of militarized masculinity. While a small literature examines the active participation of students in campaigns organized by counter-recruitment groups (see, e.g., Lagotte 2010; Harding and Kershner 2013), Johnson’s study may be the first to look at the nuanced, everyday forms of resistance that can emerge within a militarized education.

Given the difficulty of gaining critical distance from militarism and military institutions, this special section is useful at a time when indices of militarization are on the rise in the United States. Eddy and Friesen demonstrate why military recruiting in schools is problematic. They also raise some startling implications. Most importantly, Should schools continue giving the military’s sales force unfettered access to youth? To address that question, the chapters by Brooke Johnson, and Erica Meiners and Therese Quinn offer a road map for resistance to school militarism, and assess past efforts at demilitarizing schools. Taken together, the contributors to this special section are engaged in the important work of exposing and critiquing the myriad ways in which the U.S. military relies on marketing to children in order to self-sustain. Their scholarship can also be used to identify openings for activism to challenge these norms and practices. Enloe has pointed to the linkage between private scholarship and public activism: ‘To be a critical military analyst, one will have to make more complete accountings of the full costs of pursuing any given formula for raising a military, for sustaining a military, for deploying a military, for expanding a military. Once exposed, those costs may not be ones that the public is willing to bear’ (2015, 7).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.