The Wasted Generation

More than half of the young men called up by Selective Service are so fat, maladjusted, or illiterate that they are rejected for military service. Out of every four youths summoned for the draft, two will pass -- mostly because the standards have been lowered enough to accommodate their flabby bodies and unlettered minds. Of the other two out of four, one will flunk a relatively primitive intelligence test, one of whose questions may be based on the sentence, "It was a small table." The applicant is then asked whether "sturdy," "round," "cheap," or "little" is a word most like "small." The other rejectee will flunk the physical -- probably because he is simply too fat. This book, by a man who saw this shameful story firsthand, reveals the shocking facts of a national scandal: Each year, reaching manhood in this prosperous nation, are nearly 1,000,000 young men who are physical or mental cripples. Over half of the youths who are shown to be illiterate in the intelligence test are eighth grade graduates. And 6 1/2% of them actually hold high school diplomas. How can a person complete 14 years of formal schooling and still be unable to read? How can a nation that boasts of its education system produce illiterate high school graduates? Colonel Walton pondered these and similar questions as a planning officer in the Selective Service national headquarters. A study he made first revealed the wide dimensions of the rejectee scandal. Now he is revealing the scandal to the readers of this book. Colonel Walton offers no easy solution to a problem so vast. First, he says, "We need to take a long, hard look at our home life, at public school health programs, at community recreational facilities, and at an educational system which allows boys -- and girls as well -- to waste year after year in schools which fail to teach them to read adequately or to do simple arithmetic." In this book, Colonel Walton does take a long, hard look at a society that is producing such a tragically huge human scrap heap. Bluntly, yet authoritatively, he makes recommendations that are bound to touch off controversies in many homes -- and, he hopes, in Congress itself. - Jacket flap. Col. Walton served in the planning section of the Selective Service System's national headquarters from 1957 until his retirement in 1964. Writing about the generation that came of military age during the fifties and Vietnam, Walton saw a decline in national morals, civility, and responsibility. The Army, he felt, could improve the "empty heads and wasted bodies" that now characterized American youth. Col. Walton's solution is a system of truly universal national service, military or civilian, for all men between the ages of 18 and 20. - Kirkus Review.