JROTC: The Struggle Continues

First, perhaps men are unaware, but it is common for girls and women to be embarrassed to undress in front of other girls and women. It is simply a socializing difference. Usually, the older women are less embarrassed, probably because as women get older, women have to undress in front of other women as well as in front of male medical doctors, and eventually learn to cope.

Second, this writer can certainly remember the 4 years of physical education requirement in California public high schools, as well as the middle school (2 years) and the first 2 years of public colleges in the 1960s. It is all best characterized as a complete waste of time. All the games such as volleyball and dance exercise were very repetitive and nothing was achieved in terms of strength, flexibility or weight loss. Swimming should be taught no later than age 8 but it was taught in high school to those who did not take the summertime Red Cross lessons, and it is unknown if any progress was made. This writer knew how to swim from the Red Cross lessons at ages 8-10, and by high school, usually spent the year alternating between dance exercise and lap swimming during physical education. Sometimes only volleyball was offered instead of dance exercise, which was very boring as at least dance had music with it. If we just showed up and put on the appropriate uniform, we got an A in physical education, which was as it should be. It did not improve my life, my figure which was normal for a teenager or my grades, which were usually As. Good nutrition was taught at home: No junk food was allowed. They can teach good nutrition in biology class as it is best learned sitting down, listening and taking notes. I would have preferred taking a third foreign language, something more useful to me.

It is this same school, where most of the students, unlike this writer, were upper middle class, that did not have JROTC, and the upper middle class parents would not allow such a horror. JROTC is simply a military training program for the workingclass cannon fodder and should be permanentely abolished. THE SUBSTITUTE FOR JROTC IS EDUCATION: Reading, writing and arithmetic. The workingclass students need basic education, as their test scores demonstrate. They also need to be encouraged to go to the library every week and check out as many books as possible in all the languages they know, and read all of them. Reading is the key to most learning. Hopefully, they still require 4 years of Engllish literature, 3 years of history and 1 year of civics where they learn every section of the US Constitution and all amendments, and the Declaration of Independence. They should also require 2 years of a foreign language and 1 year each of biology, chemistry and physics and algebra, geometry and trigonometry to graduate. That would be a serious education.