Common Sense for the Twenty-First Century

No Child Left Behind Act

71 No Child Left Behind Act November 11, 2002 I recently visited the Valley Alternative School to talk about peace together with a group of Vietnam Veterans. The high school seniors were eager to hear about Washington’s War Mania. In preparation for this visit, I was reading about the No Child Left Behind Act, a sweeping education law passed earlier this year. It is 670 pages long and it includes a requirement for public secondary schools to provide military recruiters not only access to their facilities but also with contact information for every student. This means that when the principal of a high school receives a letter from military recruiters demanding a list of all students including names addresses and phone numbers the school officials are expected to comply. And what if they don’t? They face a cut-off of all federal aid. Never mind that this is a violation of the current student privacy laws. Unfortunately recruiters do not tell the truth. They speak of education, travel and good times. But they fail to make it clear that when you get into the service you will do what you are told or go to military prison. One of the veterans said he had 73 troops under his direction. He said they had all been told of educational opportunities in the service and that exactly three of them received any educational opportunity in the service. It seems that the lies begin in Kindergarten. Students are told that George Washington could not tell a lie. The story is a falsehood concocted by a Reverend who wanted to teach children not to lie. Education, so-called, is very disrespectful of the intelligence of children. Kindergarten children could easily discuss the merits of war and peace. They should be taught about the holocausts imposed on the indigenous, the slaves and the Armenians, the Jews, the Vietnamese, the Central Americans and the Iraqis in their earliest years of grade school. I felt a great sadness as I reflected on the fact that student alumni of this high school went off to die as the enemy in places where they were 72 not wanted. They did not know the issues, they did not know the history, they did know the motivation for the very war in which they died. They were condemned to repeat history because they had not studied it. There are now over 500,000 high school students in the Junior ROTC nationwide. Funds are taken from the budget of the Los Angeles Unified School District to pay for this military training. Non-credentialed trainers are teaching the students to aim, shoot and kill at the very time we are trying to get the guns out of our schools. One third of the homeless people in Los Angeles are veterans, the government’s historic rejection of veterans is traceable from the Revolution of 1776 to the Gulf War. A substantial percentage of the veterans of the Gulf War are suffering from the effects of depleted uranium, chemical warfare and medical experimentation . They are victims of our own friendly fire. ...