Description
This paper traces discourses of (in)security through the critical analysis of lesson plans and teaching resources created by the British Army for use in schools. Specifically, we focus on the 31 documents on the British Army website in the BASE "Lesson Library." Lesson plans are aimed at pupils in Key Stage 3 and 4, covering subjects including STEM, History, Music, Citizenship, and PSHE. These differ, but each incorporates a military-flavour into school subjects, e.g. a mathematics class invites pupils to imagine they have been kidnapped by smugglers and need to escape their captors, tackling difficult terrain and guards. This plan resonates with the British military’s "Survive, Evade, Resist and Extract" training courses, where personnel are taught survival, capture evasion, and interrogation resistance techniques. This paper examines these teaching resources using the discursive concepts of articulation (asking how ideas are attached to subjects and objects) and interpellation (asking how people are "called into" particular subject positions). We contend that the materials 1) normalise and justify militarism through the framing of social problems as holding military solutions, and 2) should be seen in the broadest terms as recruitment materials, potentially increasing future personnel numbers.
