Aggressive Military Recruitment & The No Child Left Behind Act

A few weeks ago my wife told me about a new law that had passed that would force my local public school system to give our phone number to military recruiters. I was surfing online today, and found an article about this at the Utne Reader: Leave My Child Alone. According to the article, some recruiters are contacting children as young as 14 to begin recruitment efforts. Schools who refuse to comply with the turning over of this information risk losing federal funds.

This is one of the saddest and most angering things I've lived to see. No one under the age of 18 should be submitted to the hard-sell techniques of military recruitment. It's not fair, and it's not right. One of the fundamental tenets of law that I've always been taught is that people under the age of 18 or so do not have the mental or emotional capacity to make their own decisions about things like sex, or alchol, etc. Why would making a decision about something as drastic as joining the military be different?

Frankly, there's only one reason: it's in the government's military interest to do so. It's a sad day when the US government is so wrong about its foreign policy and its use of the military that it can't staff the military sufficiently without recruiting children.

One thing you can do is make sure that you send your school's superintendent a letter asking that your child's information NOT be released to military recruitment officials. It's an exception letter, and it's one of the things that's very high on my wife's and my to-do list this week. Our son is only ten years old, and if we can prevent him from being recruited by the military, then we will.

Another thing you can do is support the Sojourners' petition in favor of the Student Privacy Protection Act.

I have one final thing to say in this post, and I'm going to join the other outraged parents' voices when I say this. "Leave my child alone."