Vets and Preps

[Veterans Day post] — I rewatched Band of Brothers in the last couple of weeks. It’s a twenty year old HBO series about battles fought over seventy five years ago. Along with the big themes of the show (how brutal and thankless it is to be a frontline soldier, and bonds formed between those who fight together), I revisited the random things about the show: the varying ability of the many British actors to deploy American accents, the racial segregation, the nuanced portrayal of some of the Germans, and in particular the depiction of American class stratification in the first half of the 20th century.

Men with college education typically entered the service as officers. They were the minority and it was a distinction that superceded rank. Being in college is depicted as a barrier between the one enlisted college man and his peers (and not just because the college in question was Harvard). There are other subtle indicators that most of the men were from backgrounds where they had not been attending college, nor were they expecting to, even prior to enlisting, despite being of general college age (not that you’d know that from the actual age and appearance of many of the actors).

After World War II the country granted a large percentage of the veterans a college education and there was the largest increase in the college educated work force in the nation’s history. That and a number of other post-WWII economic and industrial phenomena led to a tremendous increase in economic prosperity and expansion of the white middle class. (female, Black, Indigenous, Japanese American, and other veterans of color did not benefit equally, and the war time civilian female workforce was forced to give up their economic self sufficiency in order to give jobs to returning male veterans).

On balance however, the economic and educational landscape of the United States after World War II changed, and in particular college education began to be perceived as less of an elite, exclusive experience. The corollary was the public school education became something one could expect to precede a college education. It took me years after I first heard the phrase “prep school” in the early 80s, to figure out that in fact most schools, schools like the ones I went to, were not historically expected to prepare one for college.

The concept of a “college preparatory school” being exclusive was not just because they were expensive ways for rich families to cultivate markers of class exclusivity, but because college itself, and thus preparing for it was not “for” the majority of public school students. Public schools in this country evolved to get enough reading, writing, and arithmetic into working class white immigrants to enable to them to participate in the work force. It was a bare minimum social institution, not the colorful, well lit experience I had in the 70s and 80s, with film strips, field trips, art, music, and literature.

There was a period in this country of intense democratization of public education (at least for white people). The reasons were complex, but it was concurrent with some democratization of higher education, and the award of tangible valuable benefits to some of those who sacrificed and survived in service of this country.

Fast forward a few decades and we have social policies and politicians who no longer value education, sacrifice, or opportunity for the majority to work towards a better future and life for themselves. Electing someone to national office who famously shit on gold star families and POWs was a probably a symptom but if you look at the benefits to pretty much anyone in this country who isn’t a hedgefund or tech billionaire, you can see some trends. The amount the GI bill contributes to education has dropped dramatically, higher education is more expensive, public education is underfunded, and both our enlisted and veterans have less benefits.

The members of the armed services get less respect, and less reward than they did a few generations ago. In urban areas people who can afford to are sending their children to prep schools. And those who can’t go to prep school will just have to take what they can get. The rising tide lifts all boats mentality that should (I hope) be one of the core American values that we’ve been telling ourselves for generations that our service men and women fight for is not playing out in the field, at least in public policy and investment.

Everything I’ve written in the last ten days ties back to the teachers’ strike because the availability of a free, good public education touches on so many aspects of our society. Our disinvestment in public education is a symptom of disinvestment in democracy and equality itself. We cannot claim to be honoring the hardest, bloodiest, most painful sacrifices in our nation’s history while simultaneously dismantling the things that make our country worth fighting for.

Sgt John Martin, played by Dexter Fletcher in HBO’s Band of Brothers. His expression of exhausted dubiousness is a suitable mood for the moment.