NYT: Public Military Academies Put Discipline in Schools (growing trend) [View All]

[DeepModem Mom]

Public Military Academies Put Discipline in the Schools
By ALINA TUGEND
Published: April 6, 2005


Ryan Donnell for The New York Times
At Philadelphia Military Academy, students prepare for a drill team competition with old Army rifles that have been disabled. The school has 157 ninth graders and expects to grow to 9th through 12th grades.


....Current interest in public military schools is a marked contrast to the public's cool attitude toward private military academies, many of them boarding schools, after the Vietnam War. There were more than 270 private military secondary schools and colleges 40 years ago, but there are fewer than 40 today. The decline in the number of private academies has stabilized in recent years, but the growth is occurring in the public sector.

Those gains are fueled by the urgent desire of many parents and students for an orderly, safe academic environment, and by some funds from the Department of Defense....

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But if supporters look at public military schools in Philadelphia and elsewhere and see islands of stability in chaotic urban seas, critics view them - and the Pentagon's material support for them - as little more than a means to market the military to poor and working-class minority children.

Chris Inserra, who is part of a coalition to block the proposed naval academy in Chicago, said in a telephone interview that high school "is not the time to be indoctrinated into the military."The growth in military academies is an extension of a national trend over the past decade as high schools have become more accepting of a military presence on campus.

Army, Air Force and Navy junior reserve officer training corps programs, in which students take military-oriented classes and wear a uniform at least once a week, have expanded over the last 10 years across the country, from 2,410 a decade ago to 3,189 programs in high schools today, according to a Department of Defense spokeswoman. In contrast, students in military academies wear uniforms every day and are always expected to observe military courtesy, including addressing their teachers with "sir" or "ma'am."...


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/06/education/06academies.html?pagewanted=all&position=