ABSTRACT
Lockdown, surveillance, and exclusion constitute the pervasive reality for working-class youth in public high schools, which resemble prisons, military camps, and “dropout” factories, rather than sites of learning, critical thought, and human growth. In these schools, replete with metal detectors, armed guards and police, digital fingerprinting, video security systems, X-ray machines, texting-tip incentives, and bodily searches, poor youth, especially African American and Latino, are subjected to increasing levels of physical and psychological surveillance, confinement, and regimentation. Complementarily, stringent discipline policies, rising school expulsions, and narcotizing test-driven curricula, are inducing enraged hopelessness and forcing these youth out of schools at alarming rates. The physical restrictions, panoptic monitoring, and repressive measures imposed within the school walls are complemented by federal policies and nation-wide educational practices, such as school uniforms, zero tolerance policies, rote education, punitive sanctions and schools closing for low achievement on standardized tests, biometrics in schools, and proliferate JROTC programs, which signify the need for discipline, obedience, and conformity. This growing culture of militarism has been created within grossly underfunded, tax-based schools and in rapidly increasing numbers of corporate-and Pentagon-sponsored military academies for middle and high school youth in poor communities of color. Since youth identities in these communities are discursively constructed as under-achieving, behavior-problematic, violence-prone, unmotivated, education-aversive youth (i.e., the dregs of society, in need of regulatory control and restraint), who were born to aggress and fail, the imposition and presence of enforcement policies to “civilize their untamed spirits” seems merited and quite natural.
