Michael Foucault's studies of governmental rationality and disciplinary institutions inform us of state-mandated compulsory schoolin's genealogical ties to the military camp and its operations upon singular bodies to mobilize them as a collective body of biopower to be harnessed and directed toward particular ends as determined by the multiple and shifting needs of the nation-state. Where the diplomatic and military branches of the imperial American nation state work to secure resources from people and territory beyond its borders, Foucault helps us recognize how compulsory schooling seeks to secure resources from the domestic population in the form of biopower through the deployment of strategies and tactics aimed at increasing people's utility to the nation state and their docility to its imperatives. Those imperatives today, as illuminated by Nicole Nguyen's stunning new book, A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in U.S. Public Schools, include servicing the ideological and human capital demands of national security as defined under the terms of what has been presented to us since the events of September 11, 2001, as a global war on terror. But it is important to understand how the war on terror functions as ideology. First, we see how it positions itself on the defensive, only responding to real threats from evil irrational enemies. Second, it totally denies its role as the actual source of the terror it claims to be fighting. In a point that Noam Chomsky might agree with, the manufacture of consent frequently demands the manufacture and marketing of terror. Terror, in turn, manufactures a need for security that lends an air of nobility to the state's efforts to serve that cause and its marketing.