In 2013, American and British public opinion said “hell no” to plans to bomb (and surely regime change) Syria, taking the momentum out of the march to war. This marked a peak in post-Iraq war-weariness. But then in August 2014, many hearts were touched by the plight of a group of Yazidis trapped on a mountain and besieged by ISIS. So public opinion sanctioned a humanitarian military rescue. During the operation, it was revealed that the crisis was blown way out of proportion, as excuses for war so often are.

Predictably, ISIS retaliated. The group posted snuff films depicting the beheading of western journalists. American outrage was intense enough to allow President Obama to essentially launch a new war on ISIS. And since ISIS was in Syria as well as Iraq, this provided cover for American planes to enter and bomb Syria after all. This too elicited retaliation, in the form of ISIS terror attacks against civilians on western soil: in France, the U.S., Belgium, and elsewhere.

Following these attacks, western war weariness was eclipsed by a resurgent militant hostility toward Muslim peoples. Now America is in a fighting mood, and may be one major attack away from tipping headlong into war fever again. And all it took was less than two years of escalating tit-for-tat hostilities between western militaries and ISIS, starting with the Yazidi rescue, for public sentiment to revert from “hell no” to “let’s roll.” The American war machine is primed and “Ready for Hillary” or Trump.

How did we become so manipulable and herd-like? So easily spooked into hysterical stampedes? So docile and ready to be driven by our government herders over the precipice of war?

In a word, near-universal compulsory schooling. In school, students are not so much taught as they are conditioned. Schooling deeply ingrains certain mentalities that foster militancy: timidity and tribalism, dependency and docility, conformity and credulity. And so schools sow the spiritual seeds of war.

Only a people conditioned from childhood to be easily terrorized will react to small-scale crimes with mass panic. Only a people afflicted with rank tribalism will respond to the murder of a few dozen westerners by a handful of Islamists by sanctioning mass military violence against Muslim populations. Only a people beset with learned helplessness would respond to perceived threats by reflexively offering total deference to the authorities: yielding their freedoms and totally outsourcing the responsiblity to protect themselves and their families. Only a people trained to unquestioningly trust the ordained experts would let themselves be lied into war time and again.

The dependency and docility are cultivated by placing children under constant direction and supervision by teachers and administrators, who bestow favors and inflict punishments at will. Then there is the regimentation: the prescribed classroom routines, constantly being lined up, the P.E. exercises in military drill formation, the assigned movements from cell to cell according to a Pavlovian bell. Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, a daily ritual of professing submission to the State, originally prescribed it to be accompanied by what he termed “a military salute”: the same salute now famously associated with the Nazis.