At ease

We all remember this feral kid. I'll call him Tom.

Teachers who had him in their class decades ago still wake up with clammy hands and palpitations. He raised hell in school and always got his way, because the Chancellor's Regulations effectively barred any disciplinary action, because the concept of behavioral correction was equated with fascist oppression. 

His five siblings were also disruptive in all subject classes, regardless of who their teacher was. But they were usually more or less manageable. 

Their hapless guardian at home was stuck between the hardest of circumstantial rocks and hard places. She was useless, though not by choice. She struggled as a single parent, but wasn't savvy at tapping the system for survival benefits.

Because Tom cut class at will (which was a break for those of his classmates who wanted to be educated), deans and the principal's administrative cabinet would spend much of their day trailing him up and down the halls and staircases, casing every possible hiding and crawl space with walkie-talkies, occasionally affirming sightings with a "10-4", role-playing Dragnet with slapstick alacrity.

Sometimes they'd get close to Tom, but physical apprehension was too chancy. The slightest touch could trigger a lawsuit alleging corporal punishment. Tom always got the last laugh. In fact, the adults got no laughs at all. They just got winded.

Whenever the school got "distinguished visitors,”  such as a local politician or superintendent (often wearing a Ferragamo scarf and carrying a clipboard), and the facade of a thriving learning environment had to be activated,  the school leadership would huddle in advance and strategize how to keep this kid out of sight for the duration of the visit. They'd humor and cajole him with beguiling rewards, like being honored as a dean’s monitor, in exchange for not embarrassing the school administration.

It was the administration's unilateral self-imposed truce. That kid was in control. Not of himself, but of the adults. He had the staff chasing their tails and spinning their wheels.

When he "graduated,” we all wished him well and fell to our knees with gratitude that at last we were rid of him. Finally, he would be out of sight but given the collective concussion he had given our psyches, we could never be out of our minds. But the hangover faded.

A few years later Tom returned for a visit. In a U.S. Marine Corps uniform. He was transformed. All who knew him were transfixed. 

It wasn't the spiffy uniform and perfect posture. Not the shallow trappings of demeanor. It was as though he had undergone a total character transplant. 

The kid we all had bet would be top on the FBI's Most Wanted, turned out to be not just a gentleman in terms of mere etiquette, but a profoundly evolved, balanced and mature person. He was sharp, civic-minded, motivated to be a positive contributor to society, aware of social and economic injustices and ready to contribute to remedying them. 

He had become academically disciplined and focused responsibly on acquiring valuable skills and professional credentials of lifetime value. He became an independent thinker,  at least as tolerant and sympathetic to differences of opinion as one finds in the general population. 

The Marine Corps worked for him. It was a last resort, after a long list of social workers, psychologists, counselors and psychotropic medication. For Tom it was "a good fit.”

For many other kids, immersion in military culture would be a disaster. It is not a panacea, any more than is psychotherapy. But it should be more widely advertised as an available option to all high school kids in New York and elsewhere. 

Since at least the days of the Vietnam War, there has been hostile resistance to allowing military recruitment in our schools. Some of it is strictly ideology based, the claim being that the military specifically targets minorities who have been denied equal opportunity to pursue the "American Dream" by traditional means, and devalues their humanity by foreclosing other options and relegating them to "cannon fodder.”

According to the Rand Corporation, recruiter access "varied by state, with up to 14 percent of schools in some states failing to provide student contact information, not allowing recruiters access, or both.” They note that "problems were greater in large schools, schools with lower proportions of students receiving or reduced-priced lunch, and in schools in urban areas.”

Some people caricature the military mindset and depict soldiers as block-headed killing-machine robotic global police, voided shells and heartless puppets who enforce global American imperialism. 

That appears to be the view of the nonprofit The World Can't Wait and its New York City-based project "We Are Not Your Soldiers.” Ironically, many military-bashing self-styled "civil libertarians" are more militarist than they are militant, and could teach Delta Force a few tricks.

The truth is that overall, they have been a positive, occasionally majestic force in our history. The military criminal justice system is fairer than is the civilian charade, and since President Truman integrated the armed services, there has been more authentic advancement of principles, policies and practices of racial equity than elsewhere.

When our high schools have College Night and other future-planning events for graduating seniors, are the military branches invited? Can they speak at assemblies? Do they have active ROTC-type activities?

The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) has an anti-recruitment video called "Before You Enlist,”  but according to a 2019 poll by the Pew Research Center, 81 percent of post-9/11 veterans said they recommend military service.

The city's Department of Education is federally mandated to provide military recruiters certain personal information of 11th and 12th graders. If students are over 18, they can opt-out in writing. If younger, their parents or legal guardians may do so. Unless the opt-out letter is on file, confidential information will be released to recruiters on request.

It's been argued that there should be a presumption of a student being opted-out, and that special notification should be required only if they wished to have their private information released.

An abstract published in the National Library of Medicine says that military "recruitment behaviors are disturbingly similar to predatory grooming.” You'd think that this group, on the campus of the National Institutes of Health, would be less flagrantly biased, but even institutions like the Smithsonian, National Geographic and Nature, have become supercharged politically.

The New York Civil Liberties Union once demanded that the Department of Defense be billed for the information they sought, asking why the Department of Education, with a budget that exceeds that of many sovereign nations, was "subsidizing the armed forces.”

Military recruitment is among the least dire of our schools' problems. By the time the most severe, endemic and stubborn ones are resolved or even courageously identified and tackled, giraffes will have learned to fly.

In the meantime: at ease.