What the Military Taught Me About the Education System
During my second tour as a U.S. Navy officer, I served as a navigator aboard a test warship in San Diego. In port, navigators often have little to do other than prepare for the next deployment. But not every military job is created equal.
On warships, even when tied to a pier, something always breaks, and it’s the Navy’s enlisted men and women who are called upon to fix it. The Navy’s most impressive asset isn’t aircraft carriers, it’s these young servicemembers who, often barely out of high school, roll up their sleeves in the middle of the night to repair a gas turbine, install a new pump, or, less heroically, unclog a sewage line. The Navy has mastered the formidable task of turning fresh-faced teenagers into engineers, technicians, radar operators, information systems specialists, chefs, and logisticians.
After completing my military service, I worked for some years as a public school administrator, looking after young people who weren’t too far removed in age from my previous Navy shipmates. Though I entered education with a renewed mission of “making a difference for these kids,” my optimism crashed head-on into the stark realization that school remains a place utterly inept at preparing young people for the world. It’s worth asking why our public education system, which is better funded on average than in nearly every other developed country, isn't capable of doing in 12 years what the military does in a few months.
By the time they complete their initial training, service members have a keen sense of their purpose within the organization they have just joined. When they graduate from high school, however, young people have little understanding of how the system they’ve just been funneled through will prepare them for the job market they are now expected to enter. It’s no wonder our public schools don’t seem to be doing a good job when it’s not clear what their graduates should be able to know or do.
It’s a tired refrain, in fact, to remark that our education system is broken. Our kids’ academic achievement has hit all-time lows, and they’re reporting higher struggles with mental health than ever before. Public confidence in our schools has dropped precipitously since the pandemic. Meanwhile, employers are struggling to hire qualified employees, while college graduates are increasingly finding themselves unemployed. If you only looked at their test scores, you would conclude the average GenZer was barely able to tie their shoelaces together. Give them some time aboard a Navy ship, however, and they suddenly become technical experts. The Navy alone trained over 40,000 sailors last year, many newly out of high school, in hundreds of specialties.
Reshaping public schooling to equip young people with the skills and incentives to enter the job market is a potent path to reforming this wayward institution. There is a growing movement in public education, sometimes called opportunity pluralism, to reverse the "college for all” mentality with a system that more meaningfully connects students with employment. As Michael B. Horn and Daniel Curtis have pointed out, despite the decades-long push to increase access to higher education, “many American students have little sense of what jobs and careers are even possible and no concrete understanding of how college might help.”
Career Technical Education programs, while common in public school districts, generally fail to emphasize school-business partnerships that allow employers to provide mentorship and real-world learning opportunities for students. Apprenticeships, meanwhile, once a common system for upward mobility, have been supplanted by the ballooning college industrial complex. Every year, we invest over $500 billion of taxpayer money in colleges and universities, and under $400 million in apprenticeship programs.
Not every high school graduate should have the same credentials or abilities. Specialization is prized in the job market, like in the Navy, because that is what employers want. While many young people leave the school system feeling inadequate, in the military, everyone becomes an expert in his or her trade. Associating “ability” solely with academic proficiency remains one of the most baffling features of our education system.
This is not to minimize the importance of academics nor to suggest that “getting a job” ought to be the only function of public schools. Academic knowledge is not only crucial in many occupations, but it’s worthy in itself. Yet research shows that the academic achievement gap is predictable from the moment students enter school, and that instilling academic knowledge in students is best done early. We can both reform the lack of academic preparation in earlier grades while also allowing older learners, as they enter high school, to specialize in more varied types of knowledge and skills that have more direct application to entry-level jobs. And for anyone who assumes that technical trades are beneath academics, I would argue a 19-year-old who can fix a centrifugal pump has a better understanding of physics than his peer who has just completed his high school science requirement.
Because most sailors do not serve past their initial enlistment—generally four years—the Navy must maintain a well-tuned system of job training. Connecting young people with a profession, and even a purpose, may just be the cure to the “anxious generation.”
There are bright spots to follow. The nonprofit organization The Urban Assembly has established a network of career-themed high schools in New York City that focus not only on college readiness, but on connecting young people with career fields as varied as health care, software engineering, and the performing arts. And P-TECH, or Pathways in Technology Early College High Schools, is a pioneering school model that allows students to earn both a high school diploma and a two-year postsecondary degree in STEM fields at no cost. There are over 300 P-TECH schools internationally, partnering with 600 companies in sectors like IT, advanced manufacturing, and energy. These models, however, are exceedingly rare and very much alternatives to traditional schooling.
Schools cannot do it alone—they do not direct education policy. It is up to policymakers and education leaders to refocus the function of schools toward what young people will actually do with their education. While the military excels at running its own education system, families are fleeing our actual education system in droves. That benefits military recruiters, but it’s a troubling state of affairs for our schools.
