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I am not sure it does work very well. Any message which comes down officially from the school, no matter if it is about drugs, rape, abstinence, civic pride, the glory of communism or whatever is inherently uncool and cringe. Good luck competing with TikTok.
This seems like a terrible idea. At its core, pressuring young people into service is fundamentally gerontocratic, democratic only in the "two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner" kind of way. I abhorred the draft when I was 16, and I am happy to say that I still abhor the idea decades later.
Besides, if you are worried about political violence, then the last thing you would want is to give a lot of people technical and psychological training in shooting other humans.
This is a vacuous claim. I am sure the PBs see themselves as ultra-patriotic. Of course, different people had very different ideas about what being an American was all about, from lofty ideas about the relationship between the state and the individual over an entity who protects their god-given right to own other humans to run of the mill nationalism you find in any nation. Some would see the J6 efforts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as quintessentially anti-American instead.
That's not what i've been told by various leftists, wasn't there a "hitler-jugend-like" school excercise one teacher ran and had to put the breaks to it because the kids were too much into it once? Perhaps it's not whom the information comes from but how it's presented. Zoomers would be marching and yes chadding if what they are doing is associated with power, influence and coolness to their peers and more importantly the zoomettes.
The Third Wave but that was in 1967.
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Not all propaganda efforts are effective or worthwhile. I don't feel compelled to stamp out teenage contrarianism, rebellion, or progressive resistance.
The mandated schooling already does some indoctrination. That indoctrination doesn't spit out perfect American optimists, no, but it doesn't try to do that. I don't think it needs to. Nations shape culture through education all over the world. Maybe my ideal program isn't more myth based story telling in history. The program could be physical, fun, and/or charity focused. I'm open to better ideas.
If we speak only of compulsory military service, then it's more accurate to say using bodies to achieve physical tasks is fundamentally a young man's game. I like the idea of a civil service that ships you around to travel, help with charity or maintenance work, and creates bonds with Americans. FEMA disaster relief that uses our college aged manpower 19 year old. The goal isn't to only reduce propensity for violence, but to increase our commonalities through exposure, shared experience, and civic duty. If achieved, these could do more than reduce a trend of support for political violence.
It doesn't seem we disagree too much. 'Capital W-ord' isn't a plain construction it's shaded with some irony. I don't consider their branding, self-image, or claim to 'patriot' as legitimate. I explain what I recall of their image in the following sentence and mentioned January 6th prior. "Real American Patriots®" might have been a stronger form. Perhaps a case of thinking myself clever.
This definitely reminds me of the communist student work camps, where they would do things like reforesting or minor construction. I'm not sure it's that bad of an idea, you get the teens together in a common work environment and the more aware of them get to score while being away form their parents.
Construction was very different from other student work, because you were paid. Paid by the output. Agricultural and forestry work were mandatory volunteering of the worst sort, made barely tolerable by the whole "camping out in a rural school gym" being a break from the usual monotony. And yes, scoring for the more aware.
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I’d say civil indoctrination isn’t wildly effective but it does provide a decent “anchoring” effect, where kids assume it as a baseline truth and adjust from there, rather than a first exposure be TikTok.
Also the point about mandatory service seems strange since many countries do it, and it doesn’t seem to have the same claimed impact. If anything, it often permanently disillusions young men who are experience a lot of the “sitting around bored” aspect, and witness corruption firsthand, at least in cases like Taiwan and South Korea. I assume you could figure out a better donated labor system - the Inca would have people build roads or otherwise build stuff in addition to military service and it worked well - but that would be a pretty broad change and difficult to implement well.
Outside of a major economic collapse, that is.
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