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Chapter 5 analyses structural developments and the place of religion in the current Irish education system. It also gives an overview of contemporary debates on the denominational and segregated nature of the system. Despite significant religious decline (both in terms of numbers and social influence), the Catholic Church has managed to retain control over the vast majority of Irish schools. While it is now prepared to accept the transfer of some schools to other patrons, it has in the main tried to maintain its influence, developing a discourse of inclusiveness. Teacher and parent organisations and other educational actors have been voices for change (with public opinion polls also showing support for significant change), in contrast to the political mainstream. Even if there have been differences of political inflexion, with an attempt since 2010 at encouraging a diversification of patrons in the name of ‘parental choice’, the Irish State has kept to its historical role as funder of schools managed by private patrons, the current result being a perpetuation of the system along with a relative increase in the number of Educate Together schools especially, raising the issue of a new form of segregation.

The practice of modern public relations during the early 20th century is reviewed alongside Woodson’s publicity activities. Details of Woodson’s public-education program and PR style are revealed through his correspondence with Luther P. Jackson, a Virginia State College history professor, collaborator, and fundraiser for Woodson’s cause. Woodson’s last known letter was mailed to Jackson and dated two days before he died in Washington. Woodson’s command of public relations methods also is demonstrated through examination of two of his most acclaimed legacies—The Journal of Negro History and Negro History Week—in public-relations contexts that sought and won press support.

The first chapter locates Milton High School within national efforts to install militarized regimes of discipline in public education through the corporate takeover of schools, wage war under the banner of national security, and draw young people into the war-making business through fear by examining the genealogies of neoliberal school reform, zero-tolerance school policies, school militarization, and fear in U.S. politics. Knitting these strands together lends itself to an understanding of how the Milton school staff thought about the shifting purposes of education, the needs of their students, and the role of national security in their daily lives.

For decades prior to the civil rights movement, most Catholic prelates, clergy and white laity in the South did not perceive or acknowledge any conflict between their commitment to law and order and democracy, and the existence of public segregation and the denial of voting rights to most African Americans in the region. By outlawing public school segregation in 1954, the United States Supreme Court’s Brown ruling brought southern state and federal law into conflict and bore directly on Catholic leaders’ concerns about public education, law and order, democracy and the Cold War. When southern state governments took measures designed to thwart Brown’s implementation, or when public school desegregation under federal court order became imminent, diocesan leaders and some lay groups in the areas affected often spoke out in defense of public education and obedience to federal law, and called for acceptance of desegregation. Some Catholics also supported voting rights.

Chapter Five examines the value of a college degree, taking as its focus the recipients of retroactive diplomas awarded to Nikkei who were wrongly forced from high schools and institutions of higher education after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Well into their 80s and 90s, these individuals stand to gain nothing material or economic from such action, and yet they have pursued it vigorously. No less important, so have a number of activists, most notably Mary Kitagawa, who helped persuade the University of British Columbia to award degrees to students it had expelled in 1942. The value of education, this chapter argues, lies less in its economic or even intellectual promise than in its political and social potential, particularly when thought of in terms of embodiment.

The IPO of Edison Schools in 1999 was the culmination of building optimism about the potential to transform public education for the better. Edison represented the powerful proposition that a private company could deliver better public schools for less money, leaving taxpayers, investors and children better off. The messianic force behind Edison was Chris Whittle. It failed spectacularly as did widely publicized ventures before and since. The story of Whittle’s ability to continue to raise money from sophisticated individual, institutional and corporate investors over more than twenty years to pursue his educational vision is remarkable on many levels. Following the twenty year trail of unhappy investors in Whittle’s various educational efforts reveals much about K-12 business models and the suspension of disbelief in educational matters by the otherwise sophisticated.

This chapter discusses Carter G. Woodson’s early years and influences that allowed him to prevail against heavy odds. His world view was heavily influenced by the teachings of his illiterate father, who gave the young Woodson his moral bearings. He read newspapers to his father and other illiterates he encountered in the West Virginia coalfields, and the newspapers contributed to his intellectual development and understanding of issues involving politics and economics. These experiences in Appalachia, before even his first train ride and education at Harvard, laid the foundation for the public-education program Woodson developed for preserving and promoting African American history.

With the greatest need for improvements of maternity care in the south, this chapter returns the focus to the southern states. The National Organization of Public Health Nurses acknowledged the vital role African American nurse-midwives played in the public health education of black women and their families and two schools were established, one of which was the Tuskegee School of Nurse-Midwifery in Alabama. Much of the chapter is devoted to the specific training required to be effective in the isolated, poverty stricken communities of the rural south and shows how cultural sensitivity was central to nurse-midwives’ work.

Chapter documents the strategies employed by local governing officials to resist the implementation of a racially desegregated public school system in Charleston Country, South Carolina in the wake of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. It discusses the role of student-led activism in maintaining the momentum of the desegregationist movement, as well as recounts the often traumatic experiences of black children who were among the first to attended desegregated schools in Charleston County. The chapter also considers later battles for education reform in South Carolina and, as such, highlights the ongoing struggle to realise the promises of quality education throughout the state.

The Children’s Aid Society (CAS), founded in 1853, is one of the largest and oldest child and family social-welfare agencies in the country. It serves 150,000 children and families through a continuum of services—adoption and foster care; medical, mental health, and dental services; summer and winter camps; respite care for the disabled; group work and recreation in community centers and schools; homemaker services; counseling; and court mediation and conciliation programs. The agency’s budget in 2003 was approximately $75 million, financed almost equally from public and private funds. In 1992, after several years of planning and negotiation, CAS opened its first community school in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. If you visit Intermediate School (IS) 218 or one of the many other community schools in New York City and around the country, it may seem very contemporary, like a “school of the future.” Indeed, we at CAS feel that these schools are one of our most important efforts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet community schools trace their roots back nearly 150 years, as previous generations tried to find ways to respond to children’s and families’ needs. CAS’s own commitment to public education is not new. When the organization was founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Charles Loring Brace, he sought not only to find shelter for homeless street children but to teach practical skills such as cobbling and hand-sewing while also creating free reading rooms for the enlightenment of young minds. Brace was actively involved in the campaign to abolish child labor, and he helped establish the nation’s first compulsory education laws. He and his successors ultimately created New York City’s first vocational schools, the first free kindergartens, and the first medical and dental clinics in public schools (the former to battle the perils of consumption, now known as tuberculosis). Yet this historic commitment to education went only so far. Up until the late 1980s, CAS’s role in the city’s public schools was primarily that of a contracted provider of health, mental health, and dental services.

The third chapter details the social and historical contexts of Milton High School that gave rise to its Homeland Security program. Based on Milton’s earlier school reform efforts aimed at preparing poor and working class youth of color for the technical workforce, the school eventually narrowed its focus to issues of, and jobs related to, national security.

The introduction outlines the approach adopted within the book, and the main lines of argument, explaining why the decision has been taken to focus on healthcare professionals’ efforts to educate the public, rather than public opinion. Analysing recent British mental health anti-stigma campaigns, the introduction identifies common characteristics in terms of messages, objectives and difficulties encountered. It contextualises the book’s approach in relation to recent debates as to how the history of psychiatry and mental healthcare should be written, and provides a brief overview of key pieces of legislation which affected mental healthcare in the period under study. The introduction outlines how the plurality of groups working within the field of mental health, wielding divergent levels of power and status, affected discourses. A brief analysis of the concepts of stigma and discrimination is provided.

This chapter examines the role played by healthcare professionals in the production of British Broadcasting Corporation programming on mental health issues in the mid twentieth century. It outlines debates regarding the factors which shape media coverage and the capacity of television to influence public opinion before examining the Corporation’s growing interest in mental health issues. The chapter focuses on ‘The Hurt Mind’, the first television show broadcast in Britain in 1956 which was devoted to mental illness. Shaped by the views of William Sargant, the main consultant for the series, the programmes sought to reduce public fear surrounding mental illness by informing the audience of ‘the facts’. In practice, however, the series offered a rather one-dimensional analysis of the problems posed by mental illness which precluded debate and did little to alleviate public concerns regarding electroconvulsive therapy and psychosurgery. Analysis of the making of this programme illustrates how the relative power of different organisations in the field of mental health affected their capacity to influence the media.

Beginning with an autobiological account, the introduction of A Curriculum of Fear relates the author’s interest in schools featuring specialized Homeland Security program, especially Milton High School. Based on the author’s fieldwork and rooted in political geography, sociology, and critical education studies, this book examines the inner workings of Milton and its Homeland Security program. As the first ethnography of a U.S. public school with a specialized Homeland Security program, it explores how synchronizing the school with the needs of the national security industry shaped its students understandings of the world and their place in it. Moving messily between scales, this ethnography traces how Milton, by design, undertook the epistemic, political, and emotional work needed to train its students as the next generation of national security workers. By investigating this remaking of Milton, it documents the deep implications of these national security pedagogies on young people’s psyches, social imaginaries, and daily interactions.