education

By Charles Davis

April 27, 2014 | 1:45 pm

This article originally appeared on VICE.

The calls started when I was a junior in high school — always in the evening, always after The Simpsons and always with an older gentleman on the other end of the line.

“Charles, there's someone who wants to speak you,” my mother would yell from the kitchen.

She showed no concern as she handed me the phone, no alarm in her eyes over all the calls she was getting from strange middle-aged men looking to chat up her vulnerable teenage son.

That's because these creepers called themselves “colonels” and “sergeants,” which lent authority to their predation. These men were military recruiters — and the bed they wanted to get me in was housed in some barracks.

Photo: Samantha Swindler/The Oregonian

Members of the U.S. Marine Corps have visited Gaston Jr/Sr High School three times this year, but only one of those visits was considered to be for recruiting.

For two separate days in May, Marines volunteered on a school cleanup day and to run P.E. classes for high school students. During the classes, of which some opted out of participating, students went around to stations and did typical P.E. activities such as running and hitting a ball. Students also did group exercises such as dragging a peer on the ground or carrying a classmate over their shoulder. 

Those military style group exercises sparked concern from some community members.

The opening of South Wiltshire University Technical College in September 2015 will allow arms companies and the armed forces to directly influence and shape the running of a school and its curriculum.

The South Wiltshire University Technical College will teach science and engineering for ages 14 to 19 “in the context of the defence industries”, and is sponsored by weapons manufacturers Chemring, Qinetiq, security giant Serco and the Army's 43 (Wessex) Brigade.

Chemring, one of the companies sponsoring the South Wiltshire College, produce munitions, bomb detectors, countermeasures and pyrotechnics and supplies some of the world's most repressive regimes. The CS gas canister on the right was used against protesters in Egypt in 2011. (Copywrite Orhamilton/flickr)