In an elementary school in North Chicago, Navy sailors have embarked on a mission that has nothing to do with water, weapons or warfare.
Dubbed “Adopt a School,” the effort involves sailors serving as role models and helping Hart Elementary School pupils with academics.
The program, launched April 24, is one of many the Navy has undertaken to promote “character education” among its ranks and to try to transform the culture of this branch of America’s armed forces.
A decade after the Tailhook sexual-harassment scandal forced the Navy to examine itself and its values, recruits face a much different experience. Though Navy officials say it’s difficult to measure the results of the changes, some longtime critics believe there have been improvements.
“The Navy has always taught character, but the methods have changed,” said Rosemary Mariner, a retired Navy captain, a critic of gender discrimination in the Navy, and an instructor and research fellow at the University of Tennessee’s Center for Study of War and Society. “The new way is an improvement. Now they talk about ethical issues in a straightforward fashion, which wasn’t done before.”
At the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, the Navy’s only boot camp, there’s a 90-minute character education class, which provides discussion and simulation of real-life scenarios.
Gone are the days when recruits would receive a knock on the head for talking back or goofing off. “We now use counseling and remediation as ways to enforce policies,” said Senior Chief Ken Babcock, assistant public affairs officer for Recruit Training Command at Great Lakes.
Instructors emphasize the character-education lessons every day during the nine weeks of boot camp. When recruits graduate, they get to participate in community-service activities organized by the Navy. Participation is not mandatory, but Navy officials acknowledge it is encouraged.
Great Lakes sailors spend 300,000 hours per year on community service projects, said Lt. Cmdr. John Wallach, base spokesman.
The emphasis on building character is a response in part to the Tailhook scandal, but also to other problems such as drug use and low post-Vietnam morale, said Rear Adm. Ann Rondeau, commander of Naval Training Center Great Lakes.
These things “began to cut at the fabric of what we were about,” Rondeau said, and the Navy’s training programs were reinvented to better suit the post-Baby Boom generations.
“Some people coming in didn’t know the Pledge of Allegiance. They didn’t go to church. They didn’t go to schools that taught secular values,” Rondeau said. “It would be dead wrong to say that we’ve had a lower quality of people coming in over the past two decades, though. Many simply haven’t had exposure to certain principles and discipline that were once standard.”
The Navy began integrating formal character education into the basic training of enlisted recruits in 1992, Rondeau said. Similar changes were incorporated into officers’ training at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, Fla., she said.
Community service is a long tradition. For 35 years, the Navy has participated in “Project Whitehat,” through which sailors cheer sick kids at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Newer efforts include the “Saturday Scholars” program, which brings sailors to Gregory Elementary School in South Chicago to tutor and mentor children. Great Lakes sailors help with PADS shelters for the homeless in Lake County. Other projects are one-time events, such as blood drives, charity runs, or Habitat for Humanity home construction.
Navy officials say they are encouraged by the results, although they acknowledge that more work needs to be done.
“We’re not really going to change the person in boot camp,” said Senior Master Chief Jon Thompson, senior adviser to enlisted personnel. “We do try to show them what behaviors we expect. After a while, behaviors hopefully become norms, and then they become your lifestyle. Some people will regress to old lifestyles that do not fit into the Navy lifestyle, though. We do not have a 100 percent success rate.”
One outside observer, Dr. John Allen Williams, a political science professor at Loyola University Chicago who writes on civil-military relations, said he believes the Navy has done an “amazingly good job” of instilling character values.
“You see a lot of people in colleges, as well as the military, who were raised without much of a values structure,” Williams said. “Many institutions lost confidence in their own values structures in the 1970s. They basically let people get their own values.”
Petty Officer 2nd Class Valencia Blaise, a 1997 enlistee, said Navy training and community service have changed her life. She grew up in a low-income area of Tampa, where gang violence, drugs and teen pregnancy were everyday realities.
“I wasn’t very concerned about other people before I joined the Navy,” said Blaise, a basic seamanship instructor at Great Lakes. She volunteers with the homeless shelter and the Saturday Scholars.
“My experiences have made me understand that other people may save your life, and you may save theirs,” Blaise said.
