Saturday’s Chattanooga Times Free Press has an editorial taking a critical look at an article in the April issue of NEA Today, the magazine of the National Education Association. Titled “Uncle Sam Wants…You?”, the union article in question scrutinizes military recruiters’ attempts to establish rapport with schoolteachers. As the critical Times Free Press editorial put it, NEA Today

saw scary motives behind the program and approvingly cited teachers’ attempts to shut out military recruiters: “In Tucson, Arizona, Rolande Baker had had enough of the (recruiters’) feet in her and her colleagues’ doors,” the reporter wrote. If she got a note from a recruiter requesting to speak to her students, “It would make me so angry, I would tear it up into little pieces,” she said. So, Ms. Baker “successfully lobbied the Tucson Unified School District last year to severely curtail recruiters’ access to schools.”

The article included this ominous assertion as well: “The Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force are working overtime to win the attention of teachers and education support professionals in order to reach their ultimate quarry: students.”

And here all this time we thought the armed forces’ “ultimate quarry” were terrorists who would think nothing of reducing to a cinder the very schools that are intent on “protecting” students from military recruiters.