Review of Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools

Education as Enforcement is a much needed and timely response to a totalizingly paternalistic discourse of imperialism that seems to have beset the American consciousness since September 11, 2001. Within the reductive logic of current politics, and buttressed by militaristic approaches to the elusive problem of terrorism, we risk a perpetual warlike situation which, while keeping political dissent at the minimum, grants the present Us government immense power to pursue its interventionist policies worldwide. Hence, what was once done clandestinely now operates as a blatant strategy of world domination aimed at safeguarding global corporate interests. In an era when some have theorized the death of grand narratives, another grand narrative of empire is emerging—and this empire—unlike the one envisioned by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri—is not a "center-less" entity, but an empire. How can globalization—a system so blatantly egregious to the poorer parts of the world—be pandered as the new remedy for the world's problems? Why hasn't the U.S. produced a large-scale popular resistance to globalization? The beneficiaries of globalization often retort, What's your alternative to it? Education as Enforcement courageously intervenes in this debate, offering viable pedagogical strategies to render the classroom and laboratory sites where we might develop a counterdiscourse to neoliberalism and its ills.