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Originally posted by DeltAlum
A comment on your last one first. Your government tells you what to do all the time. Pay your taxes, wear your seatbelts, get a drivers license, obey traffic signals. It's called the law. There is ample precedent for forced service, too -- just look at the draft. The mechanism for that is still in place, by the way. I hope it is never reinstated because I saw personally how badly it was handled in the past. As I said somewhere before, thank goodness for ROTC in my case.
Your first point quoted above brings back the thoughts of one of my favorite professors (A fairly young, newly minted PhD in English Lit). His feeling was that it would be much better to send people off for a couple of years of military or community service before college. His reasoning was that people coming out of high school, for the most part, have no real skills at living on their own, don't understand time management, and in many cases have no idea what they want to do in the future. He felt that the added skills and maturity forced by two years of service before college would not only make for better students, but also serve as a way to weed out in advance those who may not really belong in higher education. The flunk out and drop out rates were fairly high. Most "big" schools had "flunk out" courses in the freshman year that they used to clear out the not ready for college students.
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IT could also be argued that the military may not teach them time management...as a general member, you follow a schedule laid out by a superior, would you not? Its not like every private gets to sit there with a planner and say ,"right, 0630, breakfast, 0700 PT, 0800 range practice, well, no, ok, i could do range practice at 1100." When they leave the military, how will they respond to a university without the structure provided in their military training? Is that any easier than jumping from HS to university?