Officers With PhDs Advising War Effort

[George L. Singleton]

Hi George,



Not at all! It is "the sharing of relevant experience". Besides that, I'm an Anthropologist and one of the things that we know is that stories are the basis of "learning" because they combine both emotion and logic .



I totally agree with that. I remember, during the 2nd year of my Ph.D. fieldwork, I was asked to give a "critique" seminar to the career counsellors I was studying. Within 20 minutes, we got into an intense discussion of how to construct their seminars using a model from the study of ritual (actually, a variant of Victor Turner's work). The discussion moved through all sorts of different religious traditions and, by about 25 minutes int it, we were arguing the relative merits of ecstatic rituals vs contemplative ones in training people how to write resumes. There was something surreal about discussing Divine Pomander and The Gospel of Norea in a business boardroom, but the changes made in their seminars reflected that conversation and, in the end, proved much more effective in getting people to write good resumes.

Marc

As a co-founder and past Alabama State Chairman of the Chuck Colson Prison Ministry, there are some (not vast numbers, but some) one-time, non-violent, higher IQ ex-offenders (ex-cons) who could make good enlisted men and women for any/all branches of our services. IN the process they would find a niche in life and could become military "lifers." These men and women are not of any one ethnic or racial background in my experience, but of all colors and backgrounds, bascially all from in the main poorer homes or lack of homes, and in need of remedial reading courses and such.

From experience of 6 years on the Board of the Alabama Department of Youth Services (our juvenile, under age 18 jail system) we found the same thing, young teenage boys and girls, few but some in number there who could benefit the military if remedial reading and a stable environment were available, such as the military.

In the middle of a hot war may seem an odd time to address this topic. But, some small subset of these do not need remedial reading, are actually well educated and just made stupid/dumb one time mistakes, and could be of use and easily/readily trained at the grunt use level right now.

Please don't stop the war to deal with these side issues, but someone in military manpower should be gleaning these inputs and talking to the various service recruiting commanding generals to get something done to get and use the virtually ready to go now teenagers and younger adult ex-cons who made a one time, non-violent huge mistake. They are salvagable and I believe in the main would make good enlisted personnel.

George Singleton