Teaching Terrorism

The fourth chapter looks in-depth at Milton’s curriculum to investigate how the Homeland Security program centered on threat and insecurity by exploring topics such as agro-terrorism, bio-terrorism, chemical warfare, cybersecurity, and school shootings. This chapter especially illustrates how military values and national security priorities inflected everyday life in Milton’s Homeland Security program.

Teaching War and Feeling Fear

The first chapter locates Milton High School within national efforts to install militarized regimes of discipline in public education through the corporate takeover of schools, wage war under the banner of national security, and draw young people into the war-making business through fear by examining the genealogies of neoliberal school reform, zero-tolerance school policies, school militarization, and fear in U.S. politics. Knitting these strands together lends itself to an understanding of how the Milton school staff thought about the shifting purposes of education, the needs of their students, and the role of national security in their daily lives.

Thinking Differently While under Siege

In the conclusion, Curriculum of Fear offers some closing thoughts on the enduring intersections of education, war, and national security at work at Milton High School. The chapter aims to call for the resistance of intensifying the relationship between war, national security, and U.S. public schools.

Student, Terrorist, or Patriot?

The fifth chapter looks intimately at the profound effects of an education focused intensely on terrorism, paying careful attention to how the school nurtured students’ fears. Within a racialized economy of fear, students and school staff calibrated their conduct in order to ward off terrorist threats, manage their fears, and express their love for the nation.

This Is Your Future

The third chapter details the social and historical contexts of Milton High School that gave rise to its Homeland Security program. Based on Milton’s earlier school reform efforts aimed at preparing poor and working class youth of color for the technical workforce, the school eventually narrowed its focus to issues of, and jobs related to, national security.

The Covert Researcher

The second chapter outlines the author’s methodological approach to the Milton ethnographic project and the ensuing experience. In doing so, the chapter renews debates about overt and covert research by examining the covert methods used by qualitative researchers in the field.

Welcome to Milton High

Beginning with an autobiological account, the introduction of A Curriculum of Fear relates the author’s interest in schools featuring specialized Homeland Security program, especially Milton High School. Based on the author’s fieldwork and rooted in political geography, sociology, and critical education studies, this book examines the inner workings of Milton and its Homeland Security program. As the first ethnography of a U.S. public school with a specialized Homeland Security program, it explores how synchronizing the school with the needs of the national security industry shaped its students understandings of the world and their place in it. Moving messily between scales, this ethnography traces how Milton, by design, undertook the epistemic, political, and emotional work needed to train its students as the next generation of national security workers. By investigating this remaking of Milton, it documents the deep implications of these national security pedagogies on young people’s psyches, social imaginaries, and daily interactions.