In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

142 / Part III of a gargantuan trophy to the dorm deemed cleanest and most orderly for the week. Anticipating not receiving this award, the students begin to prematurely erupt from their seats as the trophy appears. In a chorus of yelling, they pour from the building past stunned and aggravated staff members. Within minutes, the hall is empty. As evening descends, students proceed to the dormitories where one more session of “social skills” awaits them. They discuss the “skill” of the day with a counselor and then retire to their evening’s rest. The next morning, they wake to the schedule of the day before. But the next day, one is just as likely to confront reports of a riot, an “AWOL” resident, or terminations and purges carried out by administrative staff. The River to the Job While the more than one hundred Job Corps centers across the country differ slightly in focus and appearance, like military bases or prisons they share similar qualities. One marginal member of the staff at a Job Corps center in another state related his experience, which is instructive as to what the Landover program contains. Having spent his career as a music and arts teacher in the affluent suburb of a major metropolitan area and focused on awakening young adults to their potential in the arts and humanities, this former teacher retired to a rural location and bought a large tract of land amid a bucolic setting of family farms. Wanting to continue his work with young people, he discovered a Job Corps center several miles away and approached the administration about beginning a theater program there. Meeting with some skepticism, he was eventually permitted access to the center and organized musical productions. While gaining much satisfaction from his relationship with the students, the former teacher had a tense relationship with the center’s administration. Having met with resistance in his attempt to introduce literature and history into the Job Corps curriculum, when he persisted in his efforts to “humanize” the program, he was shunned. When he offered the center director a copy of A. S. Makarenko’s The Road to Life, an account of how juvenile delinquents in Lenin’s U.S.S.R. found their selves through creating a functioning village from the ruins of a town ravaged by war, the director declined the offer. Nonetheless, the teacher continued his efforts on the Job Corps campus but also brought students to his “farm” to chop wood and repair outbuildings. Here an African American teacher could regale his minority students with stories of figures from the Harlem Renaissance and great books and other fonts of inspiration not available at the Job Corps campus. While viewing the Corps with a sense of ironic detachment, he was also aware of the program’s real troubles. He had to fend off the romantic advances Landover Job Corps Center / 143 of a young female colleague who fell in love with him; he said he was “too old for such foolishness.” When she appeared on his property one afternoon and tried to enter his locked house, the teacher called the police. While using this anecdote to describe the instability he perceived at Job Corps, he also had a sociopolitical analysis of its role in American society. From his perspective, the Job Corps was established not to lift young poor people up but to keep them down. Instead of introducing poor youth to a humanistic education that would expand their horizons and open their imaginations to all they could be, the Job Corps was designed to quell urban unrest and process youth into the system by offering them rudimentary, low-level jobs that would (1) eliminate their potential to riot against an establishment that had no plans to change the systemic causes of the poverty that led to urban violence and rural malaise and (2) keep poor youth at the bottom of the society to keep them from vying with more privileged youth who were being trained to staff the upper levels of bureaucracy in the public and private sector. At the entrance to the central administration building at the center where the former teacher worked, on a poorly painted windowsill overhung by a tattered curtain, the words “I will never find someone to love me” were carved. The DOL, in collaboration with private corporations, has created an immense bureaucratic system within which Job Corps students are processed, a superstructure designed to coordinate the administration of its 122 centers...

Share