In global debates on education, schooling is
often seen as the default position, a given good. Hence there is an enormous
effort to provide universal primary education for all, as witnessed in the
major international conferences at Jomtien in Thailand
in 1990 and Dakar in Senegal in 2000. Yet schooling can
also be an obstacle to the development of peaceful individuals and societies.
There are three ways of looking at the
relationship between education and development, all of which contain elements
of so-called truth. First is the dominant discourse in international debates on
education and development – that education is of significant benefit both to
the individual and society. This can be economic benefit, in the form of human
capital theory where education increases the employment skills, productivity
and earning power of individuals and hence contributes to economic growth. Or,
according to modernization theory, education can be a social benefit in the
form of the development of more “modern” social attitudes towards, for example,
science, gender equality and the desire to achieve. Finally, education might
contribute politically by developing the values and behaviors required for a
suitable political culture that will help sustain a democratic political
system.
The second, less heard, discourse is that of
education as reproduction. While seemingly opening up opportunity for all and
contributing to the development of an economic and social system based on open
competition, achievement and merit, in fact the education system serves to
reproduce things as they are. Children from poor backgrounds go to poor schools
and then into poorly paid, low status jobs or unemployment. A small number of
children from poor backgrounds succeed in school, providing the appearance of
meritocracy, while in reality masking the role of education in perpetuating and
reproducing inequalities.
The third discourse, not heard about much at
all, is that schooling not only reproduces fundamental social structures but
also actively worsens the lives of individuals and harms the wider society.
This is because schools both cause and reproduce violence. Not only do they
fail to protect pupils from different forms of violence in the wider society,
but they actively perpetrate violence themselves. This negative role of formal
education is the focus of the present discussion.
SCHOOLS AS
PERPETRATORS OF VIOLENCE
The following are examples of five ways in
which schooling can be actively violent towards students or train them to be
violent (for more detail, see Harber, 2004).
Corporal
Punishment
Despite all that is known about its very
negative effects, one form of violence institutionally sanctioned in many
schools around the world is corporal punishment. The World Health Organization
reports that corporal punishment remains legal in at least sixty-five
countries, despite the fact that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of
the Child has underlined that corporal punishment is incompatible with the
convention (WHO, 2002). In some other
countries where it has been officially banned, such as South Africa, it is
still widely used (Nelson Mandela Foundation, 2005),
suggesting that school-based corporal punishment is still practiced in at least
one third and perhaps as much as half of the countries of the world.
Sexual
Violence
The problem of sexual harassment and
violence against girls has been neatly summarized in a recent book:
Sexual aggression by
male teachers and boys is often dismissed as “just boys being boys.” Girls are
blamed for “asking for it.” The implicit messages are that males should be
tough, assertive, sexually predatory and ready for life in a rough-and-tumble
world but females should be delicate, passive, sexually pure and sheltered.
These behaviors and messages often make schools un-safe and uncomfortable for
girls and are prominent among the reasons why, in many developing countries,
adolescent girls are far less likely to attend than adolescent boys (Leach and Mitchell, 2006, p. x).
While gender violence in schools is not a
problem restricted to developing countries, as Leach and Mitchell note (pp. 26-28),
studies have been carried out in at least eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa
which have revealed a consistent pattern of sexual abuse and harassment of
girls by male students and teachers. Some teachers abused their authority to
demand sexual favors from girls in exchange for good grades, preferential
treatment in class or money. Such teachers are rarely expelled from the
teaching profession, at most being transferred to another school. Similar
sexual harassment of female students by their male tutors was found in a study
of teacher education in Ghana
(Teni-Atinga, 2006).
A study of 300 school girls in Pakistan
(Brohi and Ajaib, 2006) found that
sexual harassment (i.e. comments, lewd suggestions,
inappropriate physical contact) was regularly experienced at
the secondary level from both male pupils and teachers. The study noted that
while the girls were uncomfortable with their experiences, they were also
protective of their schools, offering excuses for the transgressions of others
because they feared that their families might remove them from school if they knew
more about what happened, which according to the authors was a very real
possibility.
Sometimes sexual harassment becomes even
more serious. Estimates for how often a woman is raped in South Africa
vary from every 26 seconds to every 90 seconds, and a 1998 Medical Research
Council found that 37.7% of South African rape victims who specified their
relationship to the perpetrator identified their schoolteacher or principal (Human Rights Watch, 2001, p. 42).
Racial
Violence
In terms of schools deliberately breeding
racial and ethnic mistrust and hatred of the “other,” there are a number of
well-known examples such as the apartheid education system in South Africa as
well as the nationalist systems in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Kosovo, Israel and
Palestine, Turkish and Greek Cyprus, and India and Pakistan (Harber 2004:Ch.6;
Bayliss 2004). India’s
educational system serves as an example of one that perpetrates violence
against other groups within the same state.
In India, violence against lower-caste
people (Dalits) is widespread (Human Rights Watch, 1999). Schooling, however, not
only exacerbates prejudice against lower-caste people, it also acts in a
directly violent way towards them. The caste designation of “untouchable” was
abolished in 1950, but the country’s 200 million Dalits, now referred to as
“scheduled castes” or “scheduled tribes,” still routinely suffer from
discrimination. A national report in 2002 found that many lower-caste children
are regularly beaten at school by teachers who consider them to be “polluting”
the class. Additionally, the India
Education Report compiled by the National Institute of Educational Planning and
Administration noted that lower-caste pupils were regularly verbally and
physically abused: punished at the slightest pretext, often humiliated, and
made to sit and eat separately. Higher-caste teachers refused to touch the
exercise books or writing slates of lower-caste children, and they were made to
sit on their own mats outside the classroom or at the door. Additionally, many
lower-caste children are not allowed to walk through the village on their way
to school and are denied their right to free textbooks, uniforms and a midday
meal (Behal, 2002).
Examinations
In some societies there is a cultural
tradition of fierce competition within schooling that has been exacerbated by
neo-liberal market reforms. In developing countries, the competition for scarce
places in secondary and higher education, with their assumed links to the
middle and upper levels of the labor market, has become exaggerated by cutbacks
in the public provision of education as a result of poor economic performance
and World Bank-imposed structural adjustment programs based on neo-liberal
economics (Samoff 1994, IJED 1996).
Schooling is now therefore even more of a competitive assessment and serves as
a selection mechanism with ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ at all levels. The
consequences of this can be very stressful for students.
In 2003 in Egypt, for example, poor results on
the final secondary school exam caused a spate of suicides. At least nine
adolescents killed themselves, either in anticipation or as a result of low
scores on the exam that determines university admission. Because of Egypt’s growing
population and widespread unemployment, a university degree is viewed by many
young Egyptians as the only guarantee of future stability, and middle-class
families spend a great deal of money on tutors (Lindsey,
2003).
Schoolchildren in Britain are also heavily tested,
not primarily for diagnostic reasons but so that schools can be compared and
ranked and parents can make informed decisions in the educational marketplace.
What is the result of all this testing on British children? One survey of more
than 8,000 secondary school pupils in England
and Wales
in 2000 led to a report entitled Tested
to Destruction. The report claimed that stress caused by examinations is
damaging the physical and emotional well-being of the nation’s teenagers. Physical symptoms included difficulty
sleeping as well as eating disorders including bulimia and anorexia. A cartoon
attached to the article describing the survey depicts a child returning home
from school and saying to her mother, “We had a lesson in the break between
tests today” (Smithers, 2000).
SCHOOLS AND MILITARY
TRAINING
A key role of the state is to defend its
borders, requiring the loyalty of its population. School systems are used by
states for purposes of political socialization and indoctrination, and one
aspect of this is to create loyalty to the state by encouraging not only
obedience and a respect for the authority of the state (or
a particular regime), but patriotism and a proclivity to fight
for one’s country (often portrayed as coterminous with
a particular ideology or regime). Thus, in some nations such as
Prussia/Germany (Green, 1990, pp. 32,130)
and Japan
(Shipman, 1971, chapter 9), there is a
strong historical relationship between schools and the military.
In a number of countries, military training
has been introduced as part of the school curriculum. In Venezuela,
President Chavez decreed in 1999 that all school children would be given
military training. The President, a former paratrooper, ruled that all children
in the 2,200 primary and secondary schools must be given lessons in military
strategy, weapons handling and national sovereignty issues. President Chavez,
who was himself educated in military schools, first announced the militarization
of schools during a four-hour speech to Venezuela’s teachers’ union. He
received a standing ovation when he said that military training would make Venezuela more
efficient (Gamini, 1999).
In 2000, it was announced in Russia
that teenage girls were to be offered military training as part of the school
curriculum in the same way as boys. Those girls who receive military training
will be listed in the military reserves and will be liable to deployment in
times of war. Full combat training would be included, as would military theory
and practice on the firing range. The extension of military training in schools
would allow girls to compete with boys for officer training places at elite
military academies, opening up avenues for promotion in the armed services (Louis 2000).
As recently as 1999, in parts of Cambodia still controlled by the Khmer Rouge,
children were being taught how to lay landmines, how to set booby traps, how to
make weapons from fertilizer and how to transport weapons to the guerrilla
fighters on the front lines (Warren, 2002). In the United States, John Ashcroft, the Attorney
General of the first Bush Administration, has been linked to a pro-gun lobbying
group that believes that the answer to America’s school shootings is to
allow pupils to be armed in the classroom (Kettle and
Martinson 2001). WHAT ABOUT ISRAEL?
AUTHORITARIAN
SCHOOLING
What is it about the nature of schooling
that allows it to actively perpetrate violence?
Overwhelming evidence shows that the dominant global model, with some
exceptions, is authoritarian rather than democratic (Harber,
2004). Education for and about democracy, human rights,
critical awareness and peace is not commonly found in the majority of school
systems. While the degree of despotism within authoritarian schools varies from
context to context and from institution to institution, in the majority of
schools, power over what is taught and learned, how, where and when it is
taught and learned, and what the learning environment is like, is not in the
hands of pupils. Government officials,
head teachers, and teachers predominantly make those decisions, not learners.
Most schools are essentially authoritarian institutions, however benevolent or
benign that authoritarianism may be, and whatever beneficial aspects of
learning are imparted. In situations of
relative powerlessness and neglect of basic human rights, pupils can be
mistreated violently or influenced by potentially violent beliefs because the
dominant norms and behaviors of the wider society are shared, not challenged,
by many adults in the formal education system.
Why are most international formal institutions
of learning socially constructed in this way? Throughout the history of
schooling, there has always been a conflict between education for control—in
order to produce citizens and workers who are conformist, passive and
politically docile—on the one hand, and education for critical consciousness,
individual liberation and participatory democracy, on the other. It is my
contention that the former model has dominated the real world of schooling
because this was the main reason that formal, mass educational systems were
established in the first place and then expanded numerically and
geographically. Some educational writers, practitioners and policy makers have
championed the latter approach to schooling and education in general, but the
global persistence of the dominant authoritarian model suggests that the
original purpose of control and compliance is deeply embedded in schooling and
highly resistant to change as a result.
CONCLUSION
For
this writer, the twin fundamental goals of education should be both peace and
democracy, which in my view cannot be separated. The achievement of more
peaceful societies also requires the institutionalization of greater levels of
democracy than is currently the case globally. Democracy provides the best
political environment available for the peaceful solution of disputes and
conflicts. Authoritarian regimes, usually military or single party, are often
plagued by civil unrest, violent repression and resistance, over-high levels of
military expenditure, and wars with neighboring regimes. While democracies are
far from being perfect, accountable and representative governments tend to
minimize internal violence and greatly decrease the possibility of going to war
without good reason, although this is by no means guaranteed. At the micro-level
of social institutions, such as the workplace or the school, democratic
organization tends to emphasize peaceful solutions to problems and
disagreements through discussion and participation rather than imposition,
confrontation, conflict and violence.
However,
democracy is not possible without democrats. Democracy is only sustainable in a
supportive political culture where a sufficient proportion of the population
have a high commitment to democratic values, skills and, particularly, behaviours.
This is based on an understanding of democracy that goes beyond the minimum
ritual of voting (or not voting) every four or five years in an election. While
democracy does require an informed citizenry capable of making genuine
political choices, it also requires a fuller and deeper notion of democracy
that forms the basis of a democratic society
in which people actually behave in a democratic manner in their daily
interactions, including the peaceful management and resolution of conflict.
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