Up in Arms: Why Educators Must Resist the Arms Industry in Our Schools and Colleges
As a secondary school student, I remember visiting the Airbus Aerospace, Engineering, and Technology site on a school trip. Proudly nestled in our town’s small business and technology park, Airbus painted an impressive picture. They told us the story of the Mars Rover that they built and we were told that, if we worked hard enough, we could aim for the stars too. Little did I know that Airbus was also a leading manufacturer of military equipment used in wars which have resulted in countless deaths and casualties all over the world.
My town isn’t just home to Airbus, it is also home to MBDA. A joint venture between Airbus, BAE Systems and Leonardo, it is known as a world-renowned manufacturer of missiles. My dad even played for their football team. Surrounded by arms dealers and manufacturers my whole life, it’s no wonder that, on becoming a teacher, I would again be subject to the marketing campaigns of the infamous and bloody industry of arms exports. Or rather, I would be on a school trip from another perspective; working within an institution that normalises relations with such businesses of death.
Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, Thales and Raytheon, to name but a few, are reported to spend millions every year sponsoring school events, funding competitions, and even providing classroom materials: from a missile simulator for children to play with, to workshops on the benefits of using camouflage on the battlefield. At a time of increasing disruption of arms contractors and so-called defence manufacturers by activists up and down the country,1 firms like BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin are working hard on their public image. And what better audience than unsuspecting children? Presenting themselves as world leaders in advanced engineering and technology and as key contributors to the UK economy by fostering young peoples’ interest in STEM subjects and computer science, arms companies have been actively targeting school children for several years.
However, beneath the veneer of innovation and economic contribution lies the reality that arms companies are dependent on imperialism; the arms industry is geared to reap great profits from the inherent tendency towards war and military conflict within a world system of uneven exchange, and so their role in the education system is to reproduce the ideological basis for its perpetuation. As an extension of US imperial power in the region, Israel is the recipient of billions of dollars worth of arms. One wonders without such military aid and investment from Western states, whether their settler-colonial project would last a minute longer against the Palestinian resistance. The Israeli state is dependent on such arms, and the arms industry is currently dependent on the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. Between 2010-2019, the UK was the second biggest arms exporter in the world with £86 billion in sales. In 2022 alone, UK arms exports were valued at £12 billion, the most immediately relevant example of this being the UK’s £489 million arms exports to Israel since 2015. This has included the production of F-16 and F-35 fighter jets currently being used in Israel’s onslaught of Palestinian men, women and children in their homes, hospitals, and refugee camps.2 After October 7th, Israel even ordered more F-35 jets from Lockheed Martin, further entrenching the deeply imperialistic relationship between Israel, the United States and the UK. Highlighting this dynamic, US Air Force officer Mike Schmidt reportedly said ‘we are going to learn a lot’ from Israel’s use of F-35s in Gaza. The new F-35s are equipped with the latest computing capabilities, which the United States military deems as having ‘software kinks’ that need to be ironed out before the U.S can claim readiness of their fleet. Like many arms dealers, Airbus boasts that their technology is ‘field-proven’, conveniently sidestepping the grim realities of its application. Gaza is yet again a testing ground for the global imperialist powers to test their weaponry.
Amnesty International has called for several arms companies to be investigated by the ICC for complicity in war crimes. According to UK law, arms sales cannot be licensed by the British government if there is a risk of those weapons being used to unlawfully harm civilians.
In light of this, it is clear that the defence industry should not be in our schools. Far from teaching students about innovative ways to engineer technology for the future, representatives of these firms are normalising the role in which their employers play in the global political economy, reproducing war in the service of the neo-colonial system. As such, there is a clear moral argument to be made in resisting arms companies and defence contractors being invited into British schools.
Arms industry in schools
Since 2012, the Department for Education has promoted ‘military ethos’ programmes such as cadet units in state schools as well as increasing the role of the armed forces and arms industry in the provision of STEM and computing activities for students, even sponsoring youth organisations like Girlguiding and Scouts.
The image of the military is key to its survival. Recruitment targets for the Army and Navy have fallen short every year since 2010, and facing the perceived threat by Russia, ex-MI6 chief Alex Younger has added to the growing discourse around introducing conscription to suture the lack of recruits. This recruitment drive is intimately connected with the ideological maintenance of the status quo, of constructing the image of the proud and dutiful British military and associated defence industry. Such an industry plays on the innocence of children and their natural curiosity and intrigue in technology.
In 2017 ForcesWatch reported that arms companies, alongside and often in partnership with the military, have created an industry for STEM activities and sponsorship. BAE Systems, for example, ran an education roadshow with the Royal Navy and RAF, hosted by a CBeebies presenter.3 Named ‘The Big Bang Fair’, this roadshow was sponsored by 100 arms companies, attracting primary and secondary school children. BAE also invested more than £100 million in education, skills and early careers in 2018 alone. In October 2022, they delivered a workshop to one million students through their education roadshow. On average, they visit 435 schools a year, even using Lego Mindstorm kits to develop the skills to build high-tech weaponry, which the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) has appropriately called ‘grooming’.
In 2020, Declassified UK reported that the British intelligence agency GCHQ had been secretly promoting arms companies to school children. Paid for by public funds, the ‘cyber school hub’ pilot scheme in Gloucestershire run by Lockheed Martin whilst promoting BAE Systems, delivers workshops to children ages 9-10, and ‘careers advice’ for those aged 11-12 – all without the consent of parents. In the same report, it was revealed that, in some workshops, students were building drones and ‘sniffing’4 on classmates’ internet connections.
Lockheed Martin boasts a child-friendly STEM activity pack for British Science week, containing cartoonish clouds and smiling robots. The answers to their ‘crack the code’ activity include allusive and cryptic sentences such as ‘your mission is ours / we never forget who we’re working for / ensuring those we serve always stay ahead of ready’, clear efforts at instilling the military’s ethos. On the back of their activity pack is a ‘colouring activity’ of the Stealth Combat Aircraft F-35 Lightning II and the military transport aircraft the C-130J Super Hercules. Whilst in Ampthill, Bedfordshire, they host a Code Quest competition, giving students the ‘opportunity to explore new horizons in the ever-evolving ecosystem of computer programming and cybersecurity’.
Beyond workshops in STEM and computer science, the arms industry has a far wider and deeper connection to the British education system. ForcesWatch reports that, in conjunction with the Armed Forces, ‘arms companies and defence suppliers … are now influences within schools and colleges, particularly within career-led and technical education’. Of the University Technical Colleges’ sponsors, 39% are by or partnered with one or more major arms companies like BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce.
As CAAT spokesperson Andrew Smith, has pointed out, ‘Arms companies aren’t spending money in schools because they care about education or young people. They are doing it because they want to improve their reputations and normalise what they do’. ForcesWatch further expands this point, stating that ‘not only does it steer interested students towards a career in the defence industry or military and provide a mechanism for directly recruiting them, it helps to create an acceptance of military interests among young people and society at large’.
Companies involved in war crimes are, in collaboration with British intelligence services, delivering workshops in schools and creating classroom resources, which both canalise and socialise students into a normalised view of an industry built upon death. On one side of the world, children are bombed and murdered in their homes. On the other side, children are offered a career path to manufacturing and engineering weapons, offered marketing and human resources roles for war criminals, accounting and finance for the armoury of the global capitalist system. As an educator in an institution that is increasingly focussed on careers, one is found frequently questioning my role in the system and what are the intended purposes of schooling. In an effort to answer that, we must first understand the role of education in British society.
The role of education
Any educator will tell you that schools and colleges are complicated institutions. As a teacher of Sociology, I have the delight of teaching students the role of education as a part of the curriculum. Social theorists generally agree that the role of education in society is that of an agency of secondary socialisation. Socialisation, in this sense, is a process whereby young people are taught and learn the dominant norms and values of society.
Where sociologists disagree on the role of education is what norms and values are transmitted and whether this is an inherently positive process. The Marxist duo Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis conceptualised the hidden or informal curriculum as having a ‘correspondence principle’. They drew distinctions between how schools and education generally prepare young people for the exploitation in the workplace, concluding that schools ‘correspond’ to the workplace. In essence, schools mirror workplaces. Systems of punishment and reward, hierarchical relationships, strict uniform policies policing the body, and punctuality, are all norms and values that are taught informally in capitalist schooling. The key connection that they make is that schools act as an agency of the socialisation of the dominant norms and values of society, which ultimately prepare students to be docile, obedient workers that do not question their exploitation.
Similarly, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser argues that the education system is one of many social institutions that encompass the apparatus of the capitalist state. Althusser conceptualises the reproduction of the conditions of capitalist production through the apparatus of the state, playing a double function of violence and ideology. The means by which the bourgeoisie maintain their power is through the repressive state apparatus and ideological state apparatus. Althusser’s primary argument, as it is taught in the Sociology curriculum, is that the education system is a part of the ideological state apparatus, and the military is part of the repressive state apparatus. The institutions of education, our schools and colleges, belonging to the ideological state apparatus and an agency of socialisation, are vehicles of the norms, values, beliefs and worldviews of the UK ruling classes.
Althusser even argues that the educational ideological apparatus has embodied the ‘dominant position in mature capitalist social formations’. The school has replaced the church as the social institution of ideological influence. The overarching argument made by Althusser is that the ideological state apparatuses reproduce capitalist relations of exploitation. Therefore, the school becomes a site of ideological struggle.
The two apparatuses have met in the classroom. Applying Althusser’s conceptualisation of the state apparatus to the global capitalist system, the relationship between the two apparatuses crystallises in the arm industry’s normalisation campaign in UK schools. On the one hand, we have the increasing presence of the military and arms companies in schools. On the other, we have the exports of UK-made arms to entities like Israel equipping them with the technology for their genocide of the Palestinians. The ideological drive of normalisation in UK schools facilitates the next generation of British citizens to accept the social relations of British imperialism. This begs the question, how can educators resist the transmission of imperialist ideology within the school system?
How can educators resist?
As teachers, we are taught in our safeguarding training that our job is ‘loco parentis’, that we act in the place of parents, a sentiment which begs the question: would a responsible parent let a bomb maker into their home? If we truly embody this role, then we ought to act more like it; as educators, we are duty-bound to protect our children. All teachers will know that we are also duty bound to teach ‘British values’, by promoting ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs’. This was in order to, as explained by the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools Lord Nash, ‘tighten up the standards on pupil welfare to improve safeguarding, and the standards on spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils to strengthen the barriers to extremism’. It is clear that there is a double standard in the application of these values, as the extremism of the Israeli state has been unchecked by our government, despite the widely felt horror of the genocide has had on the ‘spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils’. One must not forget that ‘British values’ are a cynical attempt at curtailing ‘extremism’, which in reality is nothing more than racialised counter terror policing in schools as outlined by Dr. Layla Aitlhadj at PreventWatch on numerous occasions. Educators could use ‘British values’ as a strategic device in efforts to resist the arms industry in schools, but it is unlikely to have any cutting edge. That being said, there are two possible frameworks for resisting the arms industry in UK schools.
As a member of the National Education Union (NEU), I believe the initiation of a campaign to ban military companies, arms dealers and defence contractors from our schools is a viable route to take. There are pockets of inspiration and hope to be drawn from trade unions across the world. In the UK, the NEU successfully passed a motion at the Trades Union Congress in 2023 opposing the UK Government’s Economic Activity of Public Bodies Bill, which would make it harder to boycott Israel. In the latest national conference of the NEU, the urgent motion on Palestine overwhelmingly passed, which cemented the union’s position on the most crucial topic of our times. An amendment was carried which called the Israeli government ‘racist’ and that it has a ‘case to answer for genocide.’ Members of the NEU are now empowered to confidently speak about Palestine in our schools, building solidarity with their struggle in one of the most important sites of secondary socialisation. Members now have the protection of their union to speak up in condemning the violence of the Israeli state.
Another way to resist was outlined by Dr. Nimer Sultany, in his speech at an Educators for Palestine conference organised by Camden NEU, he wished to highlight the significance of South Africa’s success in bringing Israel to court, outlining how the consensus view, that the International Criminal Court (ICJ) has failed to properly hold Israel to account, has been misplaced. Whilst the focus of public critique on the ICJ’s lack of a call for a ceasefire, he outlined the gravity and meaning behind the demand of Israel and its allies to ensure that genocide against the Palestinians did not happen.
Dr. Sultany noted that we should look at ‘how law can influence politics’, and that as educators we should use the ICJ ruling, or international law more widely, as a basis of security to speak about Palestine in schools. His argument is that, within the context of the ICJ preliminary ruling, a legal precedent has been established. Israel has been taken to court for genocide, with enough evidence for proceedings to continue, and that they have been mandated to ensure that genocide does not occur. Whilst one does not hold much hope in international law, battling on the basis of the legality of arms exports is a potential tool for the groups resisting the Zionist entity and the UK government’s complicity. If educators are not members of the NEU, they can opt to use this legal precedent as a defence against any possible incursions or consequences that may come their way from school leadership. Furthermore, if educators wish to join me in resisting arms companies in schools and colleges, quoting the ICJ preliminary rulings as a justification may prove difficult for leadership to deny.
Meanwhile, educators can also attempt the diplomatic route by making a case to their Senior Leadership Team, arguing that having defence contractors on school premises that speak and engage with our children is immoral and goes against ‘British values’. If diplomacy is ineffective, I wonder if it is our moral and pastoral duty as educators to consider disrupting the career events and talks. A more radical intervention could prove effective in stopping them happening altogether, whether that be by pulling the fire alarm or by hijacking the presentation through visible and loud protest.
Lunch with Lockheed
Having established the framework to analyse the education system, and the fact that the school has become a primary site of ideological struggle, I believe that it is our duty as teachers to block the transmission of harmful established norms that seek to perpetuate the logic of imperialism and colonialism in whatever way we are able to. While I do not wish for any educator to lose their job, I do not wish for children to be exploited and manipulated by defence contractors either. An example from my own workplace can serve as a case study for how to foster such action against the arms trade within the school. As a part of a week-long series of careers talks, the Army and Lockheed Martin entered my school during lunchtimes late in the week. I had been forewarned of Lockheed Martin’s attendance, however the Army turned up on the day too, and a handful of students were pulled out of class to spread the message that they were to be delivering their talk in the coming lunch break.
The news of the national workplace day of action for Gaza on February 7th 2024 had inspired me to create a workplace group chat with pro-Palestinian teachers: on the top of the agenda was what to do with Lockheed Martin. After some brainstorming, we concluded that it would be more fruitful for students that we knew were pro-Palestinian to attend the talk.
Our conversation led to several students who had shown an interest in the Palestinian cause being invited to my classroom. We had a brief conversation about Lockheed Martin and the historical complicity of these types of companies in the oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocides against colonised populations in several nations. Research drew them to the sobering fact that Lockheed Martin manufactures the F-35 jets that Israel uses to bomb Gaza, and that they sold the Mark 85 bomb that was used by Saudi Arabia in the killing of 40 children on a school bus in Yemen. The increasingly horrified students took note of questions I had prepared and then developed their own to ask the representatives of Lockheed Martin.
In a conversation the next day, the students debriefed me on the deflections that the Lockheed Martin representatives made. They pressed them on their production and sale of weapons and machinery used against civilians, but the Lockheed representatives doubled down and denied making anything of the sort, only ‘tanks and turrets’ – an attempt to deny complicity in the crimes of the company at large, professing innocently that the local factory is absolved of responsibility. The students were eventually shut down by the careers officer present in the meeting, and the representatives of Lockheed Martin refused to take questions from the pro-Palestinian students.
Though the event went ahead, informed and empowered students disrupting it in this way is one of the many seeds sown for future critical thinking and activism. I am proud of these students for showing the bravery and courage to stand up and question injustice. It is time for educators to follow their lead; be empowered to speak critically about Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine, hold schools and colleges accountable as institutions of socialisation, and to make the case for the leadership of schools and colleges to cease relationships with arms companies and defence contractors.
References
1 This work is crystalised in Palestine Action’s work in shutting down Elbit factories and their subsidiaries, as well as a protracted targeting of businesses and institutions that deal with Elbit, such as the landlord to their sites.
2 Lockheed Martin manufactured the Mark 82 bomb which Saudi Arabia used in August 2018 to blow up more than 40 children on a school bus in Yemen.
3 CBeebies is a famous British children’s television channel.
4 Sniffing is a computing term that describes monitoring and intercepting network traffic. It is one of the main ways to spy on internet activity.