Prep School

I didn't have to become a teacher to find out that schools in America were geared toward making factory drones. I learned that way back in my high school history class. Public Education and the Industrial Revolution kind of went hand in hand here in the States. By the time I got my credential, I tried hard not to think about living and working in an environment controlled by a ringing bell. There has been plenty of research done and lots of effort made to create alternative forms of learning. The one we like to offer up most often is "cooperative," where small groups of students collaborate on a project or problem, much in the same way their parents are being asked to do the same thing in their cubicles at their jobs. And we still take those three months off in the summer for the harvest. What's that all about?
Meanwhile, across the aisle, a new report suggests that about seventy-five percent of the country's seventeen to twenty-four-year-olds are ineligible for military service, largely because they are poorly educated, overweight and have physical ailments that make them unfit for the armed forces. The other twenty-five percent win a chance to serve their country on the front lines. As an educator, I don't know how to feel about this. I certainly wish that only the best and the brightest of our young men and women would be defending our country, but that may not always be the case. The report, "Ready, Willing and Unable to Serve," comes after the military had one of its best recruiting years since the draft ended in 1973. During the past year, the military met all of its recruiting goals and had a higher quality of recruit than in years past. About ninety-five percent of all Army recruits had a high school diploma, up from eighty-three percent the year before. The poor economy has also been a boon to recruitment, but our next crop doesn't look as promising. "When you get kids who can't do push-ups, pull-ups or run, this is a fundamental problem not just for the military but for the country," said Curtis Gilroy, the Pentagon's director of accessions policy. Many kids are not "taking physical education in school. They're more interested in sedentary activities such as the computer or television. And we have a fast-food mentality in this country."
Maybe we've been going about this all wrong. Instead of training factory workers, we should have been preparing a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude. Factories are closing here in America, and we need to get tough. Which one of those third graders is going to be the next lean, mean, fighting machine? Hopefully it will be the one that can tie his own shoes.