This paper critiques the way in which the ‘war on terror’ has implicated education policy. This paper argues that a climate of fear of terrorism, which is rarely evidenced based, is allowing for the state to use education as part of the ‘war on terror’. I argue that the ‘ticking time-bomb scenario’, where attack is imminent, is presented as legitimate grounds for designing contemporary policy in education that infringes Human Rights and manifests a discourse of Islamophobia. Using Louis Althusser’s concept of the Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser, 1971), this paper argues that Education is a key site where dominant discourse can be established but also challenged (Hill, 2007). Firstly, I define the precautionary principle and the context in which it has been adopted by the state as a defence against terrorism. It is argued that engineering consent (Gramsci, 1971) and creating a never-ending fear scenario is part of the government’s agenda for and in education. Turning to aspect of psychoanalysis, I show how the precautionary principle is a key tool used by the government to coerce people to accept erosions of liberty through pre-emptive legislation (Marcuse, 1964). In other words, the message is that ‘we’ cannot wait for the evidence and therefore the premise of getting the revenge in first is justified. For the state, education has a key function to extinguish critical thought and resistance to the status-quo in two ways: by creating a discourse of fear; and also, in a more nuanced way deflecting and defusing civil liberties interests. The second section of this paper explicates how the precautionary principle has been implicated in education policy and practice. Using documentary analysis education policy is examined (Cf. DCSF, 2008, DIUS, 2008) that redefines the role of the educator (Curtis, 2008, Dodd, 2006; Renton, 2008). I show that the state is increasingly undermining the autonomy of the educator and attempting to re-professionalise the role as an arm of surveillance for the state. I support this position with analysis of the case of a Muslim post-graduate student studying Islamic terrorism at a British University who was detrained under terrorism charges for downloading an al-Qaeda document, ironically from a US government website (Newman, 2008). I argue that actions such as these manifest and perpetuate a discourse of anti-Islamic sentiment, a climate of fear and acceptance of non evidenced based policy making in education.

As detailed above, this paper draws on a range of methodological, theoretical, and conceptual tools including: psychoanalysis, Marxist structuralism, discourse analysis, and documentary analysis.

This paper raises many pertinent issues but the salient point made is that education is a site of ideological struggle where the state attempts to engineer consent and conformism (Althusser, 1971). To resist this, I posit an educational system that embraces critical pedagogy (McLaren, 2003) to question the status quo, especially one which rests on spurious premises based on the precautionary principle. This paper is designed to provoke debate about the nature, application and consequence of education policy that is made without an evidential basis. Although the analysis of this paper is located in the British context, the argument is generalisable and applies to government actions across Europe.