ABSTRACT
Education as Enforcement 2010 As we prepared the first edition of Education as Enforcement for publication, the United States-with more than a hundred permanent military bases around the globe-was a nation at war in Afghanistan. As the second edition goes to print, the United States has been at war on two fronts for over eight years with high troop levels expected to continue in Iraq indefinitely and the war in Afghanistan escalated by a president who campaigned on ending the war in Iraq and who (in the tradition of Kissinger who also won the Peace Prize before escalating the Vietnam War) gave a Nobel Peace Prize speech defending his war escalation. The Obama administration has expanded war to Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, while continuing rendition, the outsourcing of torture, and the vast use of for-profit military contractors whose private status enables them to operate in ways that are illegal for U.S. troops. Entering first-year university students in the United States in 2010-2011 will have spent about half of their lives living in a nation at war and will have experienced the events of 9/11/01 as children. These facts illustrate the extent to which the waging of war has become a kind of natural social fact, a backdrop for life in the United States, but also at the same time something largely kept out of the consciousness and experience of most American citizens’ daily lives. Infotainment, advertising, and public relations, a steady stream of celebrity-oriented trivia, and gossip educate most citizens heavily. Despite being awash in unlimited information that they could use to participate in democratic public life they are largely produced not as participating citizens, but rather principally as consumers and spectators. The central concern of the book remains the ways that schooling and other educative forces undermine the conditions for public and critical forms of democracy.
