Recently there has been a furor over the plan by the US Army to distribute America’s Army in high schools across the United States.  It seems that some are equating this with the idea that it violates United Nations charter that forbids countries from recruiting children under the age of 17 into the military.

First off, lets look at the actual plan that the military is looking at using in publicly funded high schools in the United States.  The US Army wants to help fund a partnership with Project Lead the Way, that will help teach high school students skills in the Engineering and Techical fields.  The Army wants to use its Americas Army PC game to set up scenarios for students where they can learn these skills without having to create real world laboratories.  Everything can be set up in a virtual environment in the game.  This has some, including the ACLU and the United Nations crying foul, stating that the US Army is looking for a way to get their game into the high schools, to use it as a recruitment tool. 

Now, while the US Army boldly admits that it does use Americas Army as a recruitment tool, I honestly think that this is not the case in this scenario.  Will people see the ways that the Army uses technology as cool and maybe open their eyes to joining the Army or another branch of the service?  Possibly, but is it any different than taking the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery or ASVAB during your sophmore year of high school?  Or the fact that many campuses around the US offer Junior Reserve Officer Training Candidate programs, which help kids learn order, disipline, technical and engineering skills, along wtih following orders and when to question orders.

The United States has always fallen behind the rest of the world in the technology and engineering fields and our students still stay away from these fields of employment, due to high learning curves, and a general fear of taking many years of classes.  People always want to boost education and training in these fields, but teachers and schools always cry about a lack of funding to build a lab or start a new line of classes for these fields.  The Army is offering a way to do it, in a virtual environment, which will be cheaper, and give some real world experience from people that are using some of the most technically advanced equipment on the planet.  I think as a country, the US should stop looking at this as a brainwashing of our children, and look at it as an opportunity to learn some skills and trades that will help them gain employment in future years.

At the end of the day, you may love or hate the Army, or even fall somewhere in-between, but we should see this this program as a way to build up the ranks and skills of our high school students, who in the end, are the future of this country.