The Pentagon Wants Your High Schoolers
The Militarization of High School
Project 2025 recommends increasing the number of Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs in secondary schools. Today there are more than 500,000 student “cadets” enrolled in this military training program, which operates at more than 3,500 US high schools. Taught by retired military officers whose salary is split between the Pentagon and the local school district, the JROTC curriculum focuses on leadership development, military science, and citizenship. Many JROTC cadets use air rifles to practice marksmanship at in-school firing ranges.
Although JROTC has long been marketed to educators, parents, and the public as an innocuous “leadership education” program with an incidental military packaging, Project 2025 explicitly links it to military recruitment efforts. Public officials and other actors have also called for more JROTC units. Yet the market is already saturated — the program is present in one out of four urban high schools nationwide, with even higher rates in fifteen individual states.
In 2023, congressional hearings and the New York Times revealed that JROTC was desperately in need of reform, citing instructors who used their positions to groom cadets for sexual abuse and students who were forced to enroll in what is ostensibly a voluntary program. Equally troubling are oversight issues: JROTC textbooks are not subject to public review, and in sixteen states, instructors are not required to hold state teaching certification — some can even teach without a college degree.
Rather than embrace JROTC as a solution to the recruiting crisis, Congress should work to ensure greater oversight of this largely unregulated part of the American high-school experience.
https://nnomy.org/en/home-73768/1076-the-pentagon-wants-your-high-schoolers.html
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