"In the first place God made idiots," observed Mark Twain . "This was for practice. Then he made school boards." The San Francisco Board of Education's 4-2 vote last week to abolish the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps program , which has been active in the city's high schools for 90 years, tends to support his view.

Why is JROTC being done away with? It isn't for lack of interest. More than 1,600 San Francisco students currently take part in its voluntary activities. "Kids love this program as if it's family," notes the San Francisco Chronicle . It is "a program that students and their parents wholeheartedly support."

Finances aren't the problem either. Operating JROTC costs the city less than $1 million out of an annual school budget of $356 million.

Nor is the problem bad management. The Chronicle reports that "no one has offered an alternative as coherent and well-run as JROTC."

Safety? Also not a problem. Though cadets have uniforms, they carry no weapons; the nonviolent programs emphasize leadership, self-discipline, citizenship, and teamwork . "This is where the kids feel safe," says one JROTC instructor, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert Powell.

And the problem certainly isn't an absence of diversity. In a story on JROTC cadets at Galileo High School , Chronicle reporter Jill Tucker writes: "These students are 4-foot-10 to 6-foot-4. Athletic and disabled. College-bound and barely graduating. Gay and straight. White, black, and brown. Some leave school for large homes with ocean views. Others board buses for Bayview-Hunters Point." Several of the students come from immigrant families. At least one is autistic.

So what is the problem with JROTC? There isn't one. The problem is with the anti military bigotry of the school board majority and the "peace" activists who lobbied against the program on the grounds that San Francisco 's schools should not be sullied by an association with the US armed forces.

"We don't want the military ruining our civilian institutions," said Sandra Schwartz of the American Friends Service Committee, a far-left pacifist organization that routinely condemns American foreign policy and opposes JROTC nationwide . "In a healthy democracy . . . you contain the military." Board member Dan Kelly, who voted with the majority, called JROTC "basically a branding program or a recruiting program for the military." In fact, it is nothing of the kind: The great majority of cadets do not end up serving in the military. Continued...