It’s Time for National Youth Service
The most valuable and most underutilized American asset is our youth population. The United States is not a small nation; in fact, it has the third largest population in the world, after China and India. American youth between the ages of 18 and 24 exceeds 24 million citizens. We speculate that at least half of them are high school graduates, computer literate, physically healthy, and mentally stable. This would give us a large quality pool of no less than 12 million young Americans.
We are facing a sad reality in America with the overall state of our youth when we judge by American standards. Our national school dropout rate stands at 30%. The figures are more distressing when we look at the dropout rate among minority youth, which is reported to be over 50%. It becomes outright heartbreaking in some parts of the country, as is the case in New York City, where the school dropout rate among black youth is above 70%. The American youth that does graduate from high school is, as a group, notoriously below international achievement levels for developed nations. Other metrics of American youth are equally troubling. In many ways much of our youth is disconnected from our society, mostly because we ask very little from it; it is the classic tyranny of low expectations. Perhaps we can begin to require more of our youth, to whom much is given by our nation.
Conscription of youth into national service has existed in practically all societies in human history. For us, it was last applied during the Vietnam War when 1.8 million young American men were called into military service. At the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, and following a national trauma over massive youth anti-draft demonstrations throughout that War, our nation opted to discontinue the draft in favor of the creation of an all-volunteer army. It was a capitulation to a rebellious segment of our youth and a clear example of surrender management in our government.
In times of war, our Army quietly suffers with insufficient manpower, using “stop loss,” the involuntary extension of soldiers’ enlistment agreements, to maintain manpower levels; over 50,000 of our troops have been subjected to this reprehensible “back-door draft.” It is also disgraceful for our nation to require our soldiers to serve multiple combat tours while virtually all of our youth stay home, oblivious to our nation’s involvement in foreign wars and in an international anti-terrorism campaign. America as a nation should bow its head in shame given the record numbers of suicides and post-traumatic stress disorder among our returning, multiple combat-tour serving troops, as well as among the neglected Vietnam veterans. The real issue is not the legitimacy or morality of our present wars; it is the injustice and the foolishness of exempting our able young men from national service in times of war. The Greek philosopher Aristotle suggested that the segregation of soldiers from society leads to unstable political order, while the more contemporary French thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau theorized that ending conscription precipitated the fall of the Roman Empire. Our country is a good and great nation with many good qualities; granting our youth a “free lunch” is not one of them.
We should create a national youth service program with the re-establishment of a lottery-based conscription system. One specific proposal presented here is the creation of a National Service Auxiliary Corps (NYAC), which would operate in a quasi-military manner. Recruits would train and reside in camps, and they would be relocated around the country as needed. Units would be detachable to serve within regular government agencies, like police, schools, immigration, public health, social services, etc. Let’s not think for a moment that the bulk of our youth would complain; they are waiting for an opportunity to become proud Americans. Let’s call on them to help us stop saying that “nothing can be done” about our intractable problems; let’s once more become a united, “can do” nation.
No comments:
Post a Comment