Teaching Homeland Security

Click here to access a 53 minute interview with Professor Nicole Nguyen broadcast over KPFA, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California.

According to Nicole Nguyen, national security-related agencies and companies are drawing young people into a mindset of militarism and war via their involvement in homeland security programs, which have been established in dozens of public schools in the U.S. Nguyen did ethnographic work at one such high school; she reveals what the students are taught and what values and beliefs they are encouraged to adopt.

I found this interview quite disturbing. Nguyen describes what many poorer school districts are faced with: inadequate funding for education and increasing pressure to focus on jobs to keep their students in school until they graduate. To make up for the lack of funding, many school districts are seduced by grants that are available from the Dept. of Homeland Security to fund curricula that promotes strong militaristic values, distorted ideas about terrorism, stereotypes about the Middle East, racist hyper-masculine conditioning, and the necessity of imperialist wars. Teachers at these schools are also assigned surveillance responsibilities to identify students who might be inclined toward terrorism.