Education for War or for Peace?
	Schools have changed. Their success is no longer measured just by the number of children they educate but also by how good they are at turning out responsible and tolerant citizens. Today, schools are expected to instil values as well as provide knowledge. Is this very ambitious goal too far ahead of reality?

"We have to get rid of the idea that more education automatically means more peace and democracy," says Cecilia Braslavsky, head of the UNESCO International Bureau of Education (IBE). "School attendance in Israel and Palestine is high, but it hasn't prevented war. Knowing how to read, write, count and reel off the great names of literature isn't necessarily an effective response to prejudice or war."

So have schools, fuller today than ever before, failed to do their job? "Not always," she says. "Afterthe Second World War, Germany managed to reform its education system and change the way children were taught. Some Latin American countries, such as Bolivia, have included local Indian culture in their schools. But all these changes take a long time."

One thing is certain however. A school's success is no longer judged by the number of youngsters it educates, but also by its ability to turn out responsible and tolerant citizens. Schools are not expected to just provide knowledge but also to teach children to "live together" - in other words, to instil shared values that will strengthen social cohesion and links between civilizations.

Fuss about textbooks

"Nowadays, schools are no longer just places where production workers are trained, they're also places where citizens are made, as the September 2001 International Conference on Education, in Geneva noted," says Edouard Matoko of UNESCO's Section of Education for Universal Values. Faced with multicultural societies, schools are required to adapt to them and open up.

The problem is that since schools are not isolated from society, they are sometimes affected by political and social tensions in their environment and even pass on certain hackneyed and partisan views, mainly through textbooks. Several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian textbook used the words "adherence" or "joining" in relation to the former Soviet republics, while the Ukrainian and Belarussian talked about "annexation".

Last year, Japan's revision of history textbooks used in its schools sparked an international row and in Israel and the Palestinian Autonomous Territories history textbooks are currently being scrutinized to see how historical events are described in them.

"There's no such thing as a completely impartial history book," says Falk Pingel, deputy director of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Germany, and author of the 1999 UNESCO Guidebook on Textbook Research and Textbook Revision. The best way to avoid biased interpretations is to present pupils with several points of view about an event so they can make up their own minds and get free of stereotypes.

Religion - a hot potato

But stereotypes die hard, especially where religion is concerned. Here, education tiptoes along the fine line between faith and pure knowledge.

Afghanistan's education system, which has been very much in the spotlight in recent months, is an extreme example of one where schools are barely separate from religion. Well before the arrival of the Taliban in 1995, the teaching of Islam was a big part of the curriculum, especially in the countryside, where classes were often held in mosques and in Arabic, so as to help people read the Koran.

The result was that since they were obliged to stay in their homes, far fewer girls were educated: in 1950, there were only 4,350 in primary and secondary schools compared with more than 90,000 boys. Scientific and technical subjects were considered contrary to the traditional values of Islam and scarcely taught in rural areas. The hostility aroused by the pro-Soviet regime that came to power in 1978 was partly because it tried to challenge this traditional education, which the Taliban took to an extreme.

Keeping religionaway from schools is not always the answer. France, where long-standing secular tradition has kept religion out of the state education system, leaves religious teaching to the individual religions themselves. Today, the authorities are realizing the disadvantages of this approach and are now exploring how to adapt the curriculum. "People have grown up not knowing about religion and that encourages stereotypes and leads to discrimination," says Rosa Guerreiro of UNESCO's Division of Intercultural Dialogue.

"I heard recently about a French history teacher who brought a copy of the Koran along to class one day to study some passages from it not long after the September 11 attacks in the United States," says Guerreiro. "She was shouted down by the pupils,many of whom were Muslims, who thought that as an "unclean" non-Muslim, she had no right to touch the holy book. That says a lot about the gulf of misunderstanding you can get between two communities."

But it is hard to see how schools can help with this teaching unless they show the way by, for example, allowing subjects to be taught in languages other than the official one. It would seem obvious that people learn better in their own language than in one that is foreign to them.

Disappearing languages

"Imagine Mandingo children learning to read. If the teacher talks in French instead of Mandingo, the children will have to learn how to read new words and also associate them with sounds they don't know," says former Malian Education Minister Adama Samassekou, president of the African Academy of Languages. "Things are a lot harder for those children. By denying them their own language, we are also denying them their own culture and that of their parents."

Since 1994, Mali has been using 'convergent teaching', which involves instructing children in their mother tongue during the first two years of primary school. After that, French is gradually drawn into the curriculum.

But such efforts are still few and far between. UNESCO noted on International Mother Language Day (21 February) that half of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world are in danger of disappearing. Experts say that between 50 and 90 per cent of today's languages will have vanished a century from now. The Indian model, often cited as an example of successful linguistic coexistence, is now running out of steam. Of the more than 400 languages spoken there, 67 are taught in primary schools and 80 in literacy classes. But
this multilingualism has not stopped English and Hindi from slowly easing out the other languages.

Teachers' attitudes matter

The era of the all-powerful schoolteacher who solemnly delivers a stream of knowledge to be absorbed by pupils is over, at least in some countries. But by giving schools the job of instilling both values and knowledge, are we not
asking too much of them?


"Human rights and education for peace aren't luxuries," says Myriam Karela of UNESCO's Section of Education for Universal Values. "They're at the very roots of a school's mission."

But unlike other subjects, tolerance and peace cannot just be taught through textbooks, like maths or geography. Knowing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights off by heart does not mean you will have more respect for your neighbour. It is more than an extra subject. It is a state of mind acquired through lessons that target pupils' intelligence as much as their feelings. If teachers themselves are not convinced of the virtues of non-violence, such an approach has scant chance of getting through to the pupils. It is they who must be targeted first of all because children cannot change their behaviour if they have authoritarian or aggressive teachers.

"Teachers must learn to express their own emotions to understand what motivates them," says Claudia Harvey, head of UNESCO's office in Kingston (Jamaica) until last December, who has set up programmes aimed at changing the style of teaching in the Caribbean. As part of a pilot project in Trinidad and Tobago, 50 teachers were asked to list their own emotional problems. Mostly rooted in childhood experiences, these problems explained a lot of the difficulties the teachers were having with their pupils.

"Non-violence is something you learn," says Antonella Verdiani of UNESCO's Section of Education for Universal Values. It is learned best through imaginative games. The UNESCO guide to non-violent resolution of conflict in schools cites several experiments that have proved effective.

Happy childhood certificate

In the Colombian city of Manizales, for example, health-care workers have invented a symbolic vaccination programme to "protect" children from ill-treatment and violence. When they have been "vaccinated", they get a "Happy Childhood" certificate that says they have been immunized against ill-treatment. They are then encouraged to "vaccinate" other children with a syringe that has no needle and contains a coloured liquid. Another example is a teaching kit in South Africa called Peace Starts With Me, that analysesthe causes and effects of violence and explains how to control anger.

Braslavsky admits cynics will probably find these efforts over-idealistic. "But of course it's a Utopia," she says. "All education is Utopia. But that's no reason to stop trying. It's a long job but it's worth the effort."

Read interviews with Ministers of Education