Preview of Article:
America’s Army Invades Our Classrooms
The military’s stealth recruitment of children
Illustrator: J. D. King
Teachers across the country know only too well that the No Child Left Behind Act requires public schools receiving federal funding to allow military recruiters access to campuses and to private student data. Now this link between the military and our public schools has gone one step further. In fall 2008, the Ohio Department of Education announced a new partnership with the U.S. Army and Project Lead the Way to “promote student interest in the engineering and technical fields” by using the military-developed videogame America’s Army in middle school and high school classrooms statewide.
According to an Army press release, students will be able to use the America’s Army gaming platform to, among other things, “explore kinematics in a ballistics project,” “test the accuracy of their calculations” in virtual environments, and “‘drive’ a vehicle around a virtual obstacle course as well as perform a virtual helicopter drop,” all in order to “increase student mastery, especially in technical studies.” Following this year’s pilot in Ohio schools, Project Lead the Way, a nonprofit with close ties to the distance learning and educational outcomes assessment market, will incorporate its America’s Army learning modules into teacher training systems for pre-engineering classes nationwide. Further applications are being considered for modules in biomedical sciences, digital electronics, and robotics.
