Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps - Opposition To JROTC

Opposition To JROTC

Controversy has arisen in the past about JROTC and militarism in schools. The American Friends Service Committee, the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO), Veterans for Peace, War Resisters League, and the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities, actively oppose the JROTC for a number of reasons, including:

• The CCCO argues that 70% of Army JROTC students that continue with Army programs enlists directly into the lowest rank of the military, Private, with many ending up worse off economically than non-veterans.
• High cost—A 1999 report by the American Friends Service Committee found that local school districts ended up paying substantially more than the cost estimate the military provided, and that a JROTC program cost more on a per-pupil basis than academic, non-military instruction.
• Lack of local control—The CCCO is concerned that the federal military dictates the JROTC curriculum and selects the instructors, resulting in local school districts losing control of curriculum and staff.
• Low-quality curriculum—The CCCO considers the JROTC textbooks to contain substandard learning material with factual distortions and outdated methods of teaching, basing their conclusions on a 1995 academic study of the Army JROTC curriculum commissioned by the American Friends Service Committee, which argues that the curriculum narrows the viewpoint of the students, encourages blind following rather than critical thinking, and indoctrinates students in militaristic authoritarian loyalty and passivity. Veterans for Peace resolved that JROTC teaching that the government gives the citizens its rights "is a complete perversion of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."

The Coalition For Alternatives to Militarism in Our Schools, formed by more than 50 teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, aims to "eliminate the Junior Reserves Officer Training Corps in our High Schools." Many cases of abuse by JROTC instructors, as well as credentialing issues, and of having students forced into JROTC due to lack of space in Physical Education classes have been noted in Los Angeles Public Schools. The group claims 2006 showed a reduction in JROTC enrollment in Los Angeles, with a drop of one-third or approximately 1,500 students, suggesting part of the explanation is efforts to stop the involuntary enrollment of students into JROTC. At Roosevelt High School in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles, a local campaign against JROTC cut the number of cadets 43 percent in four years, with a JROTC instructor reporting a 24 percent drop in enrollment from 2003-04 to 2006-07 for the rest of the Los Angeles unified School District.

In October 2005, the New York Civil Liberties Union pressured Hutchinson Central Technical High School in Buffalo, New York to release students from a mandatory JROTC program, arguing that the practice violates the State’s Education Law, which provides that no child may be enrolled in JROTC without prior written parental consent.

In May 2008, the American Civil Liberties Union stated that JROTC violates the United Nations sponsored Convention on the Rights of the Child by targeting students as young as 14 for recruitment to the military. The US has not ratified the convention.