Abstract
Largely absent from the sociological literature on fear are, as Nicole Nguyen notes, “the social processes that produce fear and how people negotiate those fears in their daily lives” (p.41). Her ethnography of a school whose principal subject of study is homeland security helps to fill that gap.With its focus on high school students and teachers, A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in U.S. Public Schools is also a good option for inclusion in undergraduate sociology of education or qualitative methods courses.
An ethnography of a school near Washington, D.C., that she calls Milton High, Nguyen’s book examines the aftermath of this uncommon approach (about three dozen high schools have formalized homeland security programs) to overhauling the instruction and reputation of a struggling public school and providing career preparation for low-income students.
Before beginning her fieldwork, Nguyen was aware that the stern disciplinary approach at the school, and its partnerships with the military and security industries, continue, as she lucidly reviews in an early chapter, a fear-based militarization of U.S. schools that dates to the Cold War and Eisenhower’s 1958 National Defense Education Act. Nonetheless, she reports, “Fear was the last thing on my mind when I first arrived at Milton. Yet fear announced itself immediately” (p.189). Students proudly shared with her what they’d learned about how to respond to innumerable threats, from staying clear of big public events to keeping a watch on one’s neighbors. “It’s alarming,” an eleventh grader told her. “I mean, Mr. John next door could be making pipe bombs in his basement. Or Ms. Nancy down the street could be making fertilizer bombs” (p.190).
A skilled ethnographer, Nguyen focuses not only on the homeland security curriculum, with courses on national security threats, emergency management, and governmental agencies and with career tracks in the defense industry and the military, along with related field trips to police academies and 9/11 sites. What is arguably more significant is that she documents the intentional infusion of a fear-based national security worldview throughout the curriculum.
Midway through the book, just as I’d taken a note to question whether she was totalizing what was, after all, only part of Milton students’ school-day experiences, Nguyen noted how an English teacher connected Romeo and Juliet to national and personal security. (Romeo needed protection from his enemies; and the plague, a peril in Shakespeare’s time, had returned.) And Nguyen documented conversations in which students directed their classroom learning onto their own school environment and peers, envisaging future school shootings as terrorist attacks and calling for more security to protect the school in the case of attacks by terrorist groups.
Yet for all that, from the perspective of a substantial portion of the school staff and student body, the homeland security orientation was for the good, a way to provide involving, engaging, groundbreaking educational and career opportunities for low-income youth and students of color. “Vo-tech of the twenty-first century,” they called it.
Nguyen largely rejects that rosy assessment. While she acknowledges that students enthusiastically engage with the coursework and fieldtrips and develop specialized skills such as Geographic Information Systems mapping (GIS), she states repeatedly her objections to the pro-military envelope in which that learning—and the students—are placed. Teachers and students should be discussing numerous related topics that are entirely ignored, she argues, such as disproportionate spending on the military over education and racial tensions in the local community. Rather than applying GIS solely to military ends like finding and killing foreign enemies, the students should use the tool to map poverty and gentrification in their communities.
Time after time, people at the school impress upon her the opportunities students receive that their peers elsewhere do not gain—white-collar skills in public speaking, teamwork, writing, leadership, networking, and the like—as well as the chance to attend college (nearly all go on to college or the military). But Nguyen dismisses as “good neoliberal subjects” (e.g., p.111) students who express enthusiasm about future careers indefense contracting companies or the military.
Dismissive catchphrases appear seldom in this book, however. For the most part, Nguyen respects the youth she studied as having agency, and she recognizes multiple outcomes of the program. As she notes, “Milton both contributed to and ruptured the cycle of funneling poor and working-class youth of color into the military or prison” (p.123).
Correspondingly, the school’s homeland security focus both diminished and exacerbated teachers’ typecasting of the students. Staff believed students could do well academically and professionally and strove to help them succeed but were also quick to view them as actual or potential menaces. While the students directed their heightened anxieties about terrorism to outsiders, teachers fretted about the students themselves. In interviews with Nguyen, they imagined unruly students morphing into school shooters and groups of students plotting attacks.
On occasion, teachers’ fears infected the ethnographer herself. After a teacher expressed anxiety to her about three boys she caught with walkie talkies—”that’s a sign that someone is going to shoot up the school or blow it up,” the teacher informed her (p.220)—Nguyen found herself afraid as well. While observing a class that afternoon, her mind drifted to scenarios of school intruders and thoughts of whether she’d do best to hide under a table or flee the building.
A Curriculum of Fear adds to what I hope will be an ever-enlarging body of empirical research on the social and cultural embeddedness of fear. As Nguyen rightly notes, “Fear, after all, is felt and experienced ineveryday life and thus calls for a more embodied understanding of its local operations and impacts on people’s everyday lives” (p.188).