Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

The teen years are often the time when young people start questioning the world around them; if it is cultivated, they begin to develop what Piaget called formal operational thought. And that’s what makes Maryland’s new homeland security high school so troubling. Before they have even a chance to think critically about the security theater and the “war on terror” (and the atrocities committed in its name), they will be taught to take part in it. Rather than learning to think, they will be taught technical skills and instructed in using them against those deemed other– those who speak “Arabic or some other nontraditional, Third World-type language” and maybe even those who wear DIY electronics.

This school takes to the extreme the tendency to use public education to create semiskilled (but not skilled enough to demand extra pay) workers rather than to nurture active and aware citizens. In so doing, it continues the work of “No Child Left Behind” which seeks to enshrine skills that can be tested with number 2 pencils filling in bubbles in place of synthesis and evaluation (while allowing for only trivial analysis). These higher skills in Bloom’s Taxonomy will always present a security risk to those in power, afterall.

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