Schools Under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education

6. “School Ownership Is the Goal”: Military Recruiting, Public Schools, and Fronts of War

104 Chapter 6 “School Ownership Is the Goal” Military Recruiting, Public Schools, and Fronts of War Tyler Wall The active search for civilian bodies, especially youthful bodies, to transform them into military bodies is a relentless military venture. Finding bodies for war is one aspect of a larger process of societal militarization , which can be understood as “the contradictory and tense social process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence” (Geyer quoted in Sherry 1995, xi). Hence, militarization can be a logistical process in that it makes mass organized violence possible while blurring civilian and military spheres by aligning other institutions with military goals (Lutz 2002a). Militarization is also a cultural process that structures the ways in which social agents make sense of the world through both material and discursive means (ibid.). Militarizing processes are highly contested and frequently relate to the social constructions of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (Enloe 2000; Lutz 2002a).Thus, it may be more accurate to speak of multiple “militarizations” than of one singular and static militarization process (Gusterson 2007). Secondary education is but one field that military agents routinely engage to shape through military logics. Military “manpower” agents, or military recruiters, are a small, albeit important, piece of societal militarization.The U.S. Army perceives all social spaces as potential “operating environments” in which to win the “hearts and minds” of citizens; however,“none have as much impact on recruiting than schools” (U.S.Army 2006, 3–5). In 1973, the military “manpower” structure switched to the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), which situated military recruiters as the practical gatekeepers of military membership (Ayers 2007). More recently, the presence of military recruiters “School Ownership Is the Goal” 105 in U.S. public schools has received increased attention as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the expansion of the war on terrorism. NCLB mandates that public schools receiving federal funding provide military recruiters with personal information about each high school student, such as names, addresses and telephone numbers. Some people, such as antimilitarization activists,“counterrecruiters,” school administrators, and parents have taken note that students can opt out of this provision by signing a form stating that they wish not to have their personal information released to military recruiters, but few people are aware of this provision. In May 2005, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced that it was in the process of creating a computerized database, which is nothing short of a surveillance system, storing the personal information of students who are sixteen to eighteen years of age as well as all college students.As of 2005, there were twelve million names on the list. The students who do in fact opt out are included on an opt-out list to ensure that military recruiters won’t contact them (Lipka 2005). So, whether they are opting out or not, the contact information of U.S. youth is archived in a Pentagon database. This raises obvious issues about privacy violation; however, by solely focusing on NCLB’s invasive provisions—although rightfully bringing attention to the harmful possibilities of the act and highlighting the most recent attempt of military access to youth—other forms of militarized control can all too easily be lost sight of. Schools are extremely important in the practices of U.S. war preparation: they geographically corral youthful bodies for military recruiters to locate easily, communicate with, and eventually enlist.As Lt. Col. Dan Daoust stated in a media interview,“There’s no substitute for that one-on-one communication of actually talking to a soldier that’s wearing that uniform. It would be great if we had all the resources in the world to be able to go out throughout all the neighborhoods and contact them in their homes, but they simply don’t.The easiest way to make contact with them is when they are all in one location” (Merrow 2004). This important but mundane spatial role of schools for military recruitment is seen especially in the context of my research site, which can be described as an overwhelmingly white, predominantly middle- and workingclass rural county in the midwestern United States. For present purposes I will refer to it as Countryside County. The local military recruiters I have talked with conceptualize their own recruiting responsibilities in relation to the handful of public high schools in the county, which each serve no more than 550 students. That is, the recruiter’s geographic...