No More Parades

His hair was always neatly combed, or alternatively, as bristly as a fresh toothbrush. He kept his elbows off the table at meals, his speech was a crisp cadence of "yes, sir" or "no, ma'am," and on occasion he even helped old ladies across the street. He was, in short, the ideal son for many a parent: a cadet turned out by one of the nation's once flourishing military schools. Today, though, many of the academies are battling for survival. They have been ambushed, they say, by the recession, the permissiveness of modern parents, and public irascibility over the Viet Nam War, which seems to have given anything military a bad name.

Rising costs and high tuitions have hurt all private schools, particularly boys' and girls' boarding schools. The major military boarding schools, however, have lost enrollment for four years running. Last year's drop at 17 major institutions was nearly 11%--more than three times the decline at other boarding schools for boys. Four military academies have shut down within the past three years; eleven have dropped their associations with the military life.

Bouncing Quarter. In part, the military schools are victims of a bum rap; they have never been major training centers for the armed forces--though the Defense Department dutifully provides support for their military programs. Instead, their self-declared aim was to produce gentlemen. "We have always maintained that the military discipline provided the finest possible supplement to one's preparation for college and the challenges of life," the Kentucky Military Institute wrote its alumni before it became secularized as the Kentucky Academy. "Unfortunately, each year fewer people seem to accept this premise." Frank Miller, an official with the National Association of Independent Schools, suggests another plausible reason for a decline in the academies' popularity. "Some young inspector comes by in the morning, drops a quarter on the bed, and if it doesn't bounce, the kid has to make it again. These days kids ask: 'How is this kind of stuff making me a better person?''

A few years ago, parents would not have concerned themselves with what the kids asked. Many looked on the military school as a kind of private reformatory for unruly youngsters, as such celebrated former students as Truman Capote and J.D. Salinger have bitterly testified. "If I catch you messing around with girls in any way," a mother tells her son in John O'Hara's A Rage to Live, "I'm going to send you to a military school in Virginia . . . They beat the boys and feed them slop, and keep them busy from six in the morning to nine at night."

Skirts Among the Uniforms. In trying to meet the mood of changing times, most academies are re-examining the "Mickey Mouse" discipline that few parents seem to want any more. Pennsylvania's Valley Forge Military Academy has cut drill from three practices a week to one. Texas Military Institute now permits civilian clothes on weekends.

Indiana's Culver Military Academy has even gone so far as to turn coed. It will enroll 74 girls this fall (along with 575 boys). The girls will not wear uniforms nor will they drill, but they will be restricted to a severely limited wardrobe of skirts and blouses. "We felt that it was a more natural type of education," says Ernest Benson, Culver's dean. "Boys will no longer accept the isolation of an all-male environment."

One question is: How much can a military academy relax and still remain military? There is, however, an even larger question: Does anybody really want military schools any more? "If the Chinese were to land on the coast of California, every military school would come into its own again," muses Colonel Derrick Whiting, headmaster of the San Rafael Military Academy, which closed its doors last month. Well before that unlikely day, the military school and its uniformed boy soldiers may soon be just a memory in the minds of many former cadets.

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