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What is it with Military Schools


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Just done a peer review of a paper which had been submitted to a peer reviewed journal. Unfortunately I had to recommend against publication as I felt some of the methodology used was flawed and the sample sizes were too small. Part of the study, admittedly a rather small part, was a followup on students who had graduated from Military Schools in the USA between 2000 and 2005. They followed up on a group of just over two hundred. Of that group some twenty percent said they were in a homosexual relationship. Just over thirty percent identified as Gay or Bisexual but were not in an ongoing homosexual relationship.

One of the reasons I advised against publication was that I disagreed with the way they had gone about selecting the sample they used for the study. To an extent it was self-selecting for members of the LGBT community. However, even given that I suspect that there is something going on in Military Schools which is biasing the student population towards a gay lifestyle.

 

 

 

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I have absolutely no expertise when it comes to U.S. military schools but I can comment that cadets identifying as homosexual no longer can be attributed to "deprivation" from heterosexual liaisons, for military schools in the U.S. are now almost all coeducational.

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Really, James?  I had no idea!  I was ready to assume Nigel's numbers and theory could be based on the fact teenage boys thrown together with no females could easily lead to homosexual activity, as happens at private schools in England.

 

Wow!  Most military schools are coed now.  Times aren't just a chanin', they've changed.

 

C

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When you say "Military Schools" of what do you speak?

The official US Military Academies (West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs, New London) or US Military Technical Training facilities (for active duty military technical training) or self-defined 'military' schools (i.e., The Citadel and VMI) or pre-collegiate military schools (i.e., Admiral Farragut and St. John's)? Lots to choose from! Almost all of the US Govt schools have indeed gone co-ed in recent years, though some private schools and a few specialized military training courses were still all-male as of the years you cite. Very few are still around today.

And what general type of information was being assembled? That might help define folks who would respond.

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12 hours ago, ChrisR said:

When you say "Military Schools" of what do you speak?

Sorry, but the definition of what they termed a 'Military School' was not given in the submitted paper, nor was their definition of the other types of educational establishments. That was one of the reasons why I advised against publication. All I can say is that the subjects would have been in the age group 13 to 18 in the period 2000 to 2005 and would have attended a establishment which the authors of the paper deemed a 'Military School' for two years or more during the period under review.

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Sounds like shabby research methodology if they didn't bother to define their main terminology.  BTW, our local youth here in Virginia who aspire to wearing the shako traditionally aim toward the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) or The Citadel in Charleston, SC, both of which have been painfully confronted with coeducation since the mid-1990s and thus would have met the time-frame conditions of the "study" you refer to.

Here, for your entertainment, is one account of the trauma of military school coeducation: 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/library/vmi/vmi0317.htm

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I hope everyone here has read Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline, a powerful and can't-put-it-down novel about life in a military school.  Great book, and a good inside look at military colleges in this country.  He himself attended The Citadel, so what you read isn't entirely fiction.

If you haven't read it, you're in for a treat.

C

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Military schools?  Gay?  Ask this guy!
 

Donald_Trump_NYMA.jpg

At age 13, Trump's parents enrolled him in the New York Military Academy, after discovering Donald made frequent trips into Manhattan without permission

Trump was not drafted during the Vietnam War.[22] While in college from 1964 to 1968, he obtained four student deferments.[23] In 1966, he was deemed fit for service based upon a military medical examination, and in 1968 was briefly classified as fit by a local draft board, but was given a 1-Y medical deferment in October 1968.[24] Trump has attributed his medical deferment to heel spurs.[25] In 1969, he received a high number in the draft lottery, which made him unlikely to be called.[24][26][27]

 

Above courtesy of WikiMedia not WikiLeaks...

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1 hour ago, dude said:

At age 13, Trump's parents enrolled him in the New York Military Academy...

I'm amazed that in all of the electoral falderal I never saw any interviews with Trump's NYMA comrades - positive OR negative. Something tells me there should have been some interesting stories and associated lessons to be learned.

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On 5/9/2017 at 2:44 PM, Merkin said:

Sounds like shabby research methodology if they didn't bother to define their main terminology.

The methodology was certainly shabby, which is why I recommend against publication. Got the strong feeling they had come up with a hypothesis and were writing a paper to fit it. Heard today that of the five asked to review it four opposed publication and the other had reservations about publication.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

My own school was neither boarding nor private, but it was isolated. We were drawn from a huge area and few had a schoolfriend within their own small village. Some took two trains and a bus to reach school... an all boys school. So close friendships only existed within school hours.

 

By fourteen, my estimation is that about three quarters of the boys in my form (home room) were in some shifting relationship, nothing formal but actively what we would now term gay or homosexual.

 

It didn't have a name in the 1950s, we would be fifteen before the existence of homosexuality as a threat to our fun and friendship would become apparent.

 

When we returned after the summer vacation someone brought news that what we considered fun was actually illegal. Suddenly the statistics changed to about 10% of us continuing liaisons... I vividly remember my first rejection by a longterm partner... I was quite offended.

 

So my version of the statistics would be that for boys in a more or less isolated environment, three quarters will enjoy boy on boy sex as long as no-one tells them its abnormal. But, the moment someone declares it abnormal the rate drops to the 10% or so who have little choice, who need it more than they need their reputation.

 

 i was lucky, even after the watershed no-one held our needs against us. Generously they treated us no differently... they just found girlfriends.

 

And... if the girlfriend didn't put out, they knew where to find us.

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