In January the superintendent of the Manchester schools, Dr. Eugene Ross, had pulled from the guidance offices at Central and West High Schools a pamphlet about Selective Service and the draft. The pamphlet had been put there by a group of teachers called the Manchester Educators Peace Project, after gaining School Board approval in August 1987. But the principal of West High School, Robert Baines, felt that the pamphlet was inappropriate for students and asked that it be removed. As of right now, the pamphlet is not available to students.
However, the military has no problem getting to students. It visits the schools at least once a week, advertises in their papers, runs aptitude tests during class time, offers free book covers, buys mailing lists from the schools, and is even part of the official curriculum, as with the Naval Jr. ROTC pro gram at West High School. In 1985, the Army was the 80th largest advertiser in the country, ranking between Mazda and Stroh's beer.
Of course, military people will say that they're just carrying out their mandate to build the best armed services available, and that's true. The problem is that they have such unopposed power in doing that. The pamphlet offered by the Peace Project was an attempt to give students some counter-balancing information, to tell them that the military is not a company like Nabisco but an organization designed to kill other human beings. The controversy around it demonstrates how much the schools support the military ethic and how much those same schools are not interested in fostering true independent thought in their students.
The unholy alliance between the high schools and the military highlights the larger belief that young people don't need, don't deserve, or aren't ready for information to run their lives and make decisions for themselves. Schools, parents, and politicians say they truly believe in freedom of thought and speech for young adults, but their actions belie their words. The Supreme Court just decided that student newspapers could be subject to prior restraint. It's incredibly difficult for young adults to get accurate and unbiased information about sex and their bodies. Students are monitored as closely as inmates in some schools, and don't enjoy Fourth Amendment protection when school officials decide to search lockers. Young adults in this society, in terms of clear, unambiguous information with which to make decisions for themselves, are malnourished, if not starved.
This may make students more docile, but it doesn't make them very good citizens. This incident with the pamphlet points out that free speech must be really free, or else it's just ventriloquism, with all of us as dummies.
Education And Morals
Late Night Musing In The Emergency Room