Essay geeked vs. locked in

essay hack: to take the pressure off of writing and enter flow state one must use an alternative method of writing than straight onto an empty doc.

This can be accomplished through writing in phone notes app or, if one does not have a phone that's easy to write with (me, Nokia) you can always use the space hey blog section as an unserious draft space. 

I've walked in the cool air and smoked a cigarette. I have escaped geekage, and am now locked in. 

This is due at 12 and is a WIP- i am literally currently typing on this blog post. 

Welcome to my essay on the school-military nexus.

The military industrial complex was a term first introduced by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 when he warned about its influence on political powers. The military industrial complex is explained as the network of institutions which produce military related technology and how they affect politics through the lobbying of increased military spending in government bodies. This system of labor and commodities is also tied with the school system in its production of recruits, which adds another dimension to the function of the military industrial complex and its relationship to how schools in the United States are structured following 1973. This system is comparable to another complex which is intrinsically tied to the school system; the prison industrial complex. While the prison industrial complex and military industrial complex have been key terms introduced in the past, they are inadequate to fully describe how the school system is linked to the reproduction of labor within these models. The term school-prison nexus addresses this issue by demonstrating the school systems function within the prison industrial complex; however for the military industrial complex there are no terms that adequately define this relationship. By examining the behaviors of military recruitment offices, and comparing them to the behaviors relevant in the school-prison nexus it becomes clear that the systems of schooling and militarization are similarly connected to school and prison systems, thus I propose the term school prison nexus as a concept to describe this unexplored relationality.

The concept of the school-prison nexus as opposed to the school to prison pipeline is that, while the pipeline establishes that students are pushed into the prison industrial complex due to inadequate schooling, the nexus argues that schooling itself is structured in a way that students who struggle academically, often minority, disabled, and financially underprivileged students, are intended to move through stages of increasing surveillance, discipline and a lack of opportunities which leave them with nowhere to go but the prison system. While the pipeline establishes a correlation between prison systems and schooling the nexus stipulates that they are intrinsically and intentionally linked in order to feed the prison industrial complex which requires the devaluing of bodies in order to profit off of their labor.

The commodification of bodies within the school-prison nexus in order to produce capital is a key aspect of its function, and the school-military nexus similarly obtains workers through this strategy of marketization. Beginning in 1973 with the abolition of the draft and the establishment of an all volunteer force (AVF), following the controversies of the Vietnam war , led the USA to need a new approach to acquiring service members. Thus led to the creation of a market model military, which commodifies the bodies and labors of service members and calls for the market to determine who is in service in the AVF. This neoliberal model which utilizes financial, educational, and health related benefits to appeal to recruits places the military in the position of a corporation seeking to sell and produce products and labor. The promise of freedom from debt and the possibility of pursuing higher education uses the education system to leverage power over those who come from under-resourced environments. 

The AVFs relationship to the American school systems became increasingly apparent after the 2001 education reform mandate, the No Child Left Behind Act, was put into law by George W. Bush. This era of American national history was shaped by the war or terror, the war in Iraq, the recent 9/11 attacks, and also a rapidly dropping recruitment rate within the military. As a result, the No Child Left Behind Act and other motions in public education allowed military promotion and recruitment to become heavily targeted towards high school aged students. NCLB established quantitative academic standards for schools that would be assessed through standardized testing, results of which each year must meet the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) benchmark at risk of losing funding or even closure of the school if it had not achieved AYP in 5 years. This led to many teachers only teaching to the test in order to secure their jobs and funding for the school, and considerably negatively impacted students' learning. The cycle of testing with increasing difficulty made it difficult for low scoring students to raise their results each year, and removed resources from communities struggling most under this system. This function within NCLB had a greater impact particularly on minority, disabled, and financially underprivileged students, who faced a widening achievement gap as the AYP benchmark was raised every year, and some students were indeed left behind. Considering the racial implications at play already within the history of standardized testing, this structure of education replicated and reinforced pre-existing inequalities within education and broader society. Another aspect of NCLB is that as a stipulation to receiving funding under this act, schools were required to share names, phone numbers, addresses, and “the same access to secondary school students as is provided generally to post secondary education institutions or to prospective employers of those students”. Due to this access of information to recruiters, they would target students to recruit based on demographics such as race, class, grades, and gender. This tactic of surveillance also led to the commodification of these student’s bodies.

This system along with NCLBs widening of the achievement gap made students who underperformed in school primary targets of recruitment tactics. Moderately lower class, and often black students, who had not fallen to the school-prison nexus, but could not afford higher education or pursue scholarship as well as students who go to traditionally rural under-resourced schools have become large demographic portions of recruits for the military. Black service members make up 20% of the military, with that percentage decreasing in positions of higher rank. Conversely middle to upper-middle-class students are largely underrepresented and nearly demographically absent from the military. In the past three years the US military has spent over 6 billion dollars on recruiting and retaining members for service, which in tandem with the ever growing military budget fuels the military industrial complex. Similarly, next to the cutting of debt relief programs for college students under the administration of President Donald Trump, education and debt relief programs within the military have been expanded, meaning that the most reliable system in place to pursue higher education for under resourced students in through using there bodies and labor as commodities within the military industrial complex.   

Another recruitment tool at play other than surveillance within schools and the leveraging of debt-relief pursuit of higher education is the Junior Reserve Office Training Corps or the JROTC. This is an adjusted version of the pre-existing ROTC for high school students that was established in 1916, but was expanded rapidly during the NCLB era. JROTC and the structure of discipline that it enacts was presented as a tool to fix problems of "city youths", who were in under resourced environments and primed to join the military industrial complex through implementation of this program. In the time period between 1992 and 2002, JROTC programs doubled, with large portions of funding going to these programs and other military academies instead of addressing structural issues inside of under-resourced public schools. This promotes a Carceral Logic of discipline in majority black and latine schools that is shared in the school-prison nexus. The same systems that utilize discipline control and surveillance under the assumption that these communities are violent and dangerous also use these tactics to push students towards pursuing violence and aggression as commodities within the military-industrial complex, much like within the prison industrial complex. The marketization of military recruitment and the expansion of military related school programs such as JROTC, as well as expansion of recruitment focused surveillance post 2001, caused the further commodification of students, which tied with racial capitalist structures solidified a school-military nexus. Much like the school-prison nexus, this shares the connection between commodifying the bodies of students through the praxis of surveillance and discipline while exploiting under-resourced minority, and lower income communities. 

While organizations have emerged to push back against this system, the use of the opt out tactic and counter recruiting tactics do not address the fundamental structural issues at play within the school military-nexus and the marketized military system. 

Bibliography

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