You know, the fundamentalists are deluded about the public schools. They constantly complain about anything sexual, but they let the schools decide to do mandatory ASVAB testing, and otherwise turn these kids into good little patriots and citizens, without batting an eyelash. You can’t sell part of a soul.
Is service in the US military tantamount to selling one’s soul? If so, why do you believe it to be so?
No, I think mandating collection of data from children, so it can be used to market militarization to them, is selling their souls. Quite literally.
Public schools are not about education; they’re about citizenship. And in that regard, they’re very successful, for all the whining about their low academic standards. Bypass the myths, and we’re really talking about creating generations of people, by conditioning them when they are cognitively most susceptible and defenseless, to be components/cogs in service to the state, by propping up its order, and supporting the assumptions of the dominant culture.
Think of the state as having not just political components, but essential social, military, economic, corporate (formerly industrial) components. So statism requires conditioning in all these areas. Then think about the social atmosphere common to public school systems, the economic atmosphere, the atmosphere of achievement (what kind, how it’s rated/judged, what it means). There’s been a good sociological work on this, incidentally, so it’s not an unfounded set of ideas. 🙂
Statism is heresy. And conditioning statists from their youth is abuse. That’s how I see the schools. The militarization of children, in the culture at large, and by its instrument (the schools) is just a component of this that I happened to hit on at this moment. 🙂