[Reading-hall-of-fame] A Memorial Day Message

[Thomas Sticht]

5/25/2018



A Memorial Day Message



There Are No Names of "Morons" on This Wall!



Thomas G. Sticht

International Consultant in Adult Education



On Memorial Day each year we pause to give our thoughts to our fellow
citizens who have given their lives in military service to preserve the
freedom that we take for granted. Inevitably, each year as Memorial Day
approaches, I think of the visits I have made to honor those who died
during the Vietnam War whose names are carved into the black stone wall of
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in our Nation's capitol.



Over the years, I have observed that while on Memorial Day tributes will be
given to special groups, the battalions of the Army and Marines, the battle
groups of the Navy, the air wings of the Air Force, and others, one group
of service members will go largely unnoticed and unappreciated. Indeed,
they were unwanted to begin with, and only used when the demands for
manpower at the front became so great that the military services had to use
them. They are the undereducated, marginally literate young adults who
score between the 10th and 30th percentiles at the lower end of the
military's bell curve of aptitude, known in military personnel circles as
“Category IV’s” and in other, less professionally restrained circles as
“dummies.”



Though they have always been enlisted to fight in major wars when bodies
are needed in the front lines, to serve as what some derisively call
“cannon fodder,” most undereducated, less literate young adults  have been
excluded from serving in the armed forces during peacetime, when the
benefits of medical care, education, training, and travel are available
without the constant threat of being killed in war. Perhaps the most
pernicious use of undereducated young adults came during the Vietnam War.



In August of 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara stood
before the Veterans of Foreign Wars and announced that in addition to
fighting the war in Vietnam, the military was also going to help fight
President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, at home. They would start taking
in hundreds of thousands of undereducated, disadvantaged young men who were
being rejected for service because their Armed Forces Qualification Test (
AFQT) scores were at the lower end of the military's AFQT bell curve
distribution. Because the plan was to enlist about 100,000 low literacy
recruits a year, it was called Project 100,000. The men recruited under the
project became officially known as the New Standards personnel.
Unofficially, I was told by Mr. McNamara in an interview in 1985, they were
called "McNamara's Moron Corps."



The Project 100,000 recruits worked under the stigma of demeaning
stereotypes and prejudice developed in the 20th century for those who score
low on standardized mental tests. Speaking at Defense Appropriations
hearings in 1965,  Senator Saltonstall upheld this tradition in a reply to
a statement about the "lower mental groups" made by General Earle Wheeler,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.



"What you are saying General, is that, in substance, the great problem that
we face throughout this country today when we see these terrible crimes
that are being committed everywhere are being committed by the lower
mentality which you say, and I agree with you, you have kept out of the
Army and, therefore, you have a lower disciplinary area in the Army because
they have a higher intellect. Those poorer ones are cluttering up our jails
and committing crimes and attacking women today."



But despite the negative feelings and beliefs about the less literate
service members of Project 100,000 an extensive reanalysis of their
performance revealed that over 90 percent completed both their basic
military and job training with no problems, 97 percent had no problems with
military justice, and some 84 percent completed their tour of duty with
well over 80 percent being rated as “good” or “highly effective."  Over 1300
gave their lives for their country and presumably their names are on the
wall of the Vietnam War Memorial along with the more than 50 thousand other
names of those who died serving our Nation.  Among these names there are
those of Irish, English, Italian, Jewish, Native American, African
American, Hispanic, and other ethnic descent, but there are no names of
"morons" on this wall!



Analyses indicate that not only were the Project 100,000 personnel highly
successful as military members, they also were successful after leaving the
military. They rose from living in poverty before their service to earning
incomes and supporting their families well above poverty levels some 20
years later.



In 1966, the same year that Project 100,000 was announced, the U. S.
Congress passed the Adult Education Act, which created for the first time a
joint federal and state supported education system for out-of-school,
poorly educated adults. Nowadays some 1,500,000 adults participate yearly
in the Adult Education and Literacy System which provides the best
education services it can with an obscene, poverty funding level of less
than $450 federal dollars per enrollee. This at a time when we spend an
average of over $8,000 federal dollars trying to “fix” the children of
these adults in the compensatory programs of Head Start and over $12,000
per student in Early Head Start. Somehow, this seems like ignorance of
understanding that the real head start for children starts with the heads
of the parents!.



This Memorial Day we should remember the service of those undereducated
military men who served honorably, with many giving their lives for the
society that has repeatedly cast them off as unfit. We should demand the
resources to provide our undereducated adults with the greatest adult
education system in the world. When the cry for citizen soldiers goes out,
when the time to put their lives on the line comes around, these low
scoring citizens of the bell curve are there and they serve their country
competently and honorably.



What could be a greater, living memorial to the many undereducated adults
who have fought for our freedom than a great educational system in their
memory. They deserve no less.



Note: The new analyses of Project 100,000 are included in a book from
Fordham University Press edited by Sanders Marble and entitled Scrapping
the Barrel: Armies Use of Sub-standard Manpower 1863-1968.



tgsticht at gmail.com
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