By: Albert Korach

Junior ROTC program

Veterans day has just passed and again I read where a so-called representative group is trying to bar parental choice.It's about a parents right to choose a program that THEY wish their child to participate in. As an 84 year old retired teacher, former Executive Board member, VP of your pension fund and retired Lt Colonel I'm for the right to choose.

Service in the military is an honorable choice and a legitimate occupation. I would be the first to state that that some of the situations that the military have been involved in were not the ricght choices. We must realize it is our legislators and leaders that made these choices and not the military.

I had only 1/2 semester of ROTC but I quickly learned the meaning of neatness, dress and discipline. I was taught to be courteous and obey the orders of those in charge. Of course "gang banging was out. I was also taught that going for a job interview with your pants hanging below your crotch would keep you unenployed.

Most of all I learned the meaning and value of education. It helped me go from a private to Lt. Colonel. I'm now retired with a pension, medical care and a lot of memories. Do not celebrate Veterans Day then bar freedom of choice.

By: David R. Stone

Respect parents' choices!

Choice is good. Parents, teachers and community activists at Ames agree with Albert Korach that students and parents should have the freedom to choose a school that offers JROTC or other military themes. But when an unelected school board makes decisions behind closed doors, and politicians break promises and ignore the wishes of the community, people�s freedom to choose is denied.

The debate at Ames is NOT about the value of military schools vs. neighborhood schools. If Mr. Korach is correct that even a short exposure to military culture (such as his half semester in JROTC) can change students� lives, then Ames students already have that. They are free to sign up for an after-school cadet program at Ames, taught by some of the instructors from Marine Academy High School.

If parents� choice is respected, Ames would remain a neighborhood school. Parents and community members fought to get the school built, and have worked hard to build it into a school with a successful bilingual program, a community health clinic on site, and a thriving after-school program that draws students from surrounding schools as well as Ames.

In a year when CPS closed 50 schools, there are plenty of other places to open a military school. The decision to take over the Ames campus is not about choice � it is simply a power grab.

-David R. Stone

full-time teacher at Ames & part-time reporter at Substance News

By: Rod Estvan

choice and informed choice

I have great sympathy for Al Korach's thinking on the value of military training in relation to self discipline and work skills. The University of North Dakota ROTC Fighting Sioux Battalion paid for my college education and I paid the Army back with completing my service obligations. I have no regrets and lived to write about it.

But the issue is informed choice not just choice isn't it? While Al was able to rise from the ranks to Lt. Colonel many, in fact the majority who try the Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning route to a commission fail to make the cut. Officer conversion programs take a limited number of candidates each cycle and there is a significant wash out rate of 20-25% for those who are picked.

In order to enter an Army College ROTC full scholarship program no matter at what college the freshman must have a minimum ACT composite score of 19, many of the students in CPS junior ROTC programs will not make that cut score. Parents don't know about that, parents in fact don't even know about the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery test that will determine what service school a recruit goes to after basic training.

The United States Military Academy at West Point is one of the more selective colleges in the country, and applicants need to have a nomination from a member of congress. The minimum composite score last year for admission was 25.

The average ACT score at the Chicago Military Academy High School last year was 17.9, at Carver Military Academy 16.4, and at Phoenix Military HS 18.8. The truth is the vast majority of these junior ROTC students will not make the cut to make it to 2nd Lt in the army. But the parents of these students don't know that do they. That is the problem, not service to our nation.

Rod Estvan

By: Albert Korach

Junior ROTC and education

Rod Estvan, I enjoyed your comments and I thank you for your service.My comments had nothing to do with being in Junior ROTC as a path to the military acadamies. It had more to do with at a junior age being taught the importance of dress, respect for authority and most of all the importnce of education.

I agree that choice is also important.

The need for education is not only stressed in civilian life but also in the military.

One has only to go through the many military bases such as Great Lakes Naval to see the many colleges that have satalite offices on post. I did not have a chance to attend one of the military acadamies but received my graduate degree from the University of Chicago while holding two part time jobs.

I received military leave and took the Medical Service Corps Basic Officer Course (MSC) at Brook Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Upon completion I was qualified for the (MOS) military occupational specialty of Asst. Btn. Surgeon. (admin. position not MD) There were other schools such as Atomic Warfare, etc.that gave me the ability and require knowledge to further advance.

Having grown up in a labor union family I was the only social liberal in barracks full of conservatives. I do not feel that you and I are that far apart.

I graduated close to the bottom of my high school class before I GOT SMART! The point of my comments was in my last paragraph. "Most of all I learned the meaning and value of education." Junior ROTC is not the answer to everything but it sure beats gang banging. I hope we can meet some day after I head north.

By: ARNY STIEBER

Military in public schools

I think it's a myth that kids need the military to teach them discipline. Art, music, drama, creative writing, poety, yoga - these all teach discipline. They also teach creative thinking and reasoning.

The military teaches the "discipline" of following order without question. This, I believe, is counter-productive to a child's education, and in the broader scope, counter-productive to a democracy.

I'm a father, grandfather, retired businessperson with an MBA, married 42 years, military veteran (Army, infantry, Viet Nam) and a member of Veterans For Peace. The military has it's place - but not in the life of a child.

By: David R. Stone

Saying no to THIS military school

I favor teaching peace-making skills over teaching military discipline, but there may be a place for some military schools in some communities. For example, Chicago Military Academy in Bronzeville built on a proud history by reclaiming an abandoned armory that had created opportunities for African Americans to become heroes long before the U.S. military was racially integrated.

But Ames Middle School has its own proud history of creating opportunities for minority students. Parents and community members have emphatically chosen to keep Ames as a neighborhood school.

Arguments about the value of military schools in general will not stop the fight to keep any military school from taking over THIS particular school.

-David R. Stone

By: George N. Schmidt

Complex realities of military training in Chicago

Although the Lane Tech rifle range has been closed for years, I have a hunch it's still there, in the vast basement of Chicago's largest high school. And for a good many years, there was little or no debate about whether military training should be available to Chicago's high school students. In fact, Chicago's public schools proudly provided that training, and after World War II, Chicago's schools became one of the places where veterans -- of all races -- could find decent jobs. Many of the "Red Tails," the Tuskeegee Airmen, wound up teaching in Chicago schools after their storied "two-front" fight against fascism there and racism here.

Vietnam changed all that. A nasty imperialist war that shouldn't have been fought became a flashpoint for more than just opposition to that incident, and since then the adventures of the U.S. from Afghanistan to Iraq to Panama and Grenada have made a mockery of the ideals for which our parents and grandparents fought in World War II.

One of our family's treasures is the "Service Medal" that was given to every man (including my father, 44th Division, ETO, 1941 - 45) and women (my mother, U.S. Army Nurse Corps who ended her war on Okinawa in late 1945) who had "served" during the years of World War II. And there was nobody in my home town (Linden New Jersey) who thought to denigrate that "service" -- while everyone knew when people talked about "the service" that they meant military service (and almost always in combat during World War II; I grew up in a working class town...).

While the expansion of "military high schools" in Chicago has been obscene, the general idea of providing ROTC to students who want it is not the problem. Since my generation helped end the military draft by the mid-1970s (and this generation still waits to say a proper "Thank You" to the "Baby Boomers") it has been better for young men and women to be able to make that choice than to be forced into the "service" during a time when most U.S. military activities are imperial and sometimes (e.g., drone killings) doubtless criminal.

By the time I was in high school, I faced some interesting choices, since for my generation of men from my home town, the "service" was taken for granted. When I was blessed with the time to study the reality of Vietnam and then to make a choice, I shocked both my family and my home town by becoming a conscientious objector, the first in the history of the Local Draft Board in Elizabeth New Jersey. Because every member of that Draft Board knew someone in my family (all my father's brothers, my father, and my mother had been in "the service" during The War), they were really interested to find out why I had taken the stand I had. After a long conversation during Christmas 1968, the members of the Draft Board voted to make me their first "CO" -- even though I had made it clear to them that I was not a pacifist and that I would have joined my older generation in The War. But, as we discussed, Vietnam Was not The War, despite all the nonsense we were subjected to in those years.

By the time the American phase of the Vietnam War was over in 1975, the tragedies had multiplied, and, once again, the USA had abandoned most of our "friends" to their fates as our officials took the last helicopter off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). The same fate has since befallen those men and women who took "our side" in Iraq and Afghanistan. And many of those men who tried to write about the betrayals were censored in the USA.

It's sheer coincidence that I'm writing this on the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Were the United States again to face war against the evils of slavery (as we did in the 1860s) or Nazism and fascism (as we did in the 1940s), I would hope that we would quickly get over the almost knee-jerk pacifism that has been our fate as a result of the imperial adventures that various presidents from Johnson to Obama have driven us to.

And were such a day to come again, I assume that we would be happy that Lane Tech and other public schools still had the facilities to train our young men (and now, young women) in the skills necessary to fight to defend those Four Freedoms on that Service Medal we have on display here at my home.

On the one side of the medal is Victory, with a broken sword.

On the other side are the "Four Freedoms" --

Freedom from want and fear

Freedom of speech and religion

My parents and their generation, with all their imperfections, knew that those simple rights were much of what "we" were fighting for then. And as anyone who has visited (or worked in research or retiree organizing) here in our living room and dining room knows, we proudly display the photographs of my sons' grandparents -- and the two American flags that our family received when they died.

By: Rod Estvan

Military in public schools

I can appreciate Arny's opposition to military training of youth on the basis of opposing war. I also honor Arny's service and his opposition to the Vietnam war.

However, on the issue of benefit of quasi military discipline on urban children I disagree in part and for certain subgroups of students I agree with Arny.

First where I believe Arny is correct that a junior ROTC program is not beneficial in terms of teaching self discipline and control to students. There are situations where parents have enrolled students with moderate behavior disorders and oppositional defiant disorders in military high schools thinking it will straighten them out.

I have had special education cases at both Bronzeville and Carver where parents have done this. In general students who have actual psychological problems including severe ADHD fail under a military disciplinary regime. There is a reason why all the branches of the military are exempt from the Americans with Disabilities Act and recruits with various pre-existing forms of mental illness are eventually excluded.

A military program can greatly benefit however some students who do not have actual disabling conditions or have mild or moderate learning disabilities but have a lack of structure in their homes and may be called for the lack of a better term borderline socially maladjusted. These young people deeply desire structure and team sports or ROTC can be helpful.

But we need to also be clear that a combat experience may for some youth who could be called socially maladjusted a very dangerous thing once combined with post traumatic stress disorder. I have always believed that some of the more horrific war crimes committed by US forces have been the actions of young people who are boarder line and the terrible stress of combat pushes them over the top.

I agree with Arny that military discipline does involve not openly questioning orders from a commanding officer or higher ranking NCO. But currently at least in the Army soldiers are taught that the Nuremburg defense does not work. You are not exempt from charges relating to war crimes if you are following orders.

For example executing wounded prisoners even when not doing so may put your own life in danger is not acceptable. Do such things happen and do COs look the other way -yes they do. But US combat soldiers have been prosecuted for executing wounded Taliban and of course for killing non-combatant civilians in very high stress situations.

I deeply appreciate the posts on this important issue in Substance. I consider it very unfortunate that these more complex issues were not discussed when Mr. Vallas launched full military schools subject to quasi military discipline. Now these schools are as they say facts on the ground.

Rod Estvan