Moyer’s links the war, economy, and the disintegration of the social fabric of the US and suggests:
So here’s a suggestion. In a week or so, when the president announces he is escalating the war, let’s not hide the reality behind eloquence or animation. No more soaring rhetoric, please. No more video games. If our governing class wants more war, let’s not allow them to fight it with young men and women who sign up because they don’t have jobs here at home, or can’t afford college or health care for their families.
Let’s share the sacrifice. Spread the suffering. Let’s bring back the draft.
Yes, bring back the draft — for as long as it takes our politicians and pundits to "fix" Afghanistan to their satisfaction.
Bring back the draft, and then watch them dive for cover on Capitol Hill, in the watering holes and think tanks of the Beltway, and in the quiet little offices where editorial writers spin clever phrases justifying other people’s sacrifice. Let’s insist our governing class show the courage to make this long and dirty war our war, or the guts to end it.
E. Wayne Ross is Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. He research interests focus on the influence of social and institutional contexts on teachers' practice as well as the role of curriculum and teaching in building a democratic society in the face of antidemocratic impulses of greed, individualism, and intolerance. In recent years he has examined the influence of the educational standards and high-stakes testing movements on curriculum and teaching. His most recent research investigates the surveillance-based and spectacular conditions of (post)modern schools and society in an effort to develop both a radical critique of the "disciplinary gaze" and a means by which teachers, students and other stakeholders might resist its various conformative, anti-democratic, anti-collective, and oppressive potentialities. He has published in a wide variety of academic journals as well as the popular press, including Z Magazine. His books include: Neoliberalism and Education Reform (edited with Rich Gibson); The Social Studies Curriculum; Race, Ethnicity and Education; Defending Public Schools, and many others.Ross is a co-founder of The Rouge Forum, a group of educators, parents, and students seeking a democratic society. He is also editor of several academic journals, including Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, Cultural Logic, and Critical Education. A former secondary social studies (grades 8-12) and day care teacher in North Carolina and Georgia, Dr. Ross was Distinguished University Scholar and Chair of the Department of Teaching at the University of Louisville prior to his arrival at UBC in 2004. He has also been a faculty member at the State University of New York campuses at Albany and Binghamton.
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