Schooling

Children and education have been adversely affected by violent conflicts that have plagued various regions on the African continent in recent times. Examples of such situations are Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the DRC and Liberia. In many countries, societal violence spills over into schools (Salmi, 2009:399). On the other hand, the level of access to education or a lack of access, is known to have

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an effect on the presence or absence of violence and conflicts. One of the reasons why the Liberian civil war was so violent and indiscriminate was a lack of provision of education to the population through the public school system (Harber, 1996:163). Tidwell (2004:463) considers conflict, peace and education to be a tangled web. In this section, we explore how education may help to minimise violent conflicts, or increase the same, in the dual and contradictory nature of formal education. Formal schooling is potentially a powerful tool that could be used to provide education that is concerned with peaceful resolution of conflict through analysing the causes of violence and teaching values and skills that are congruent with peaceful behaviour. As Harber (1996:152) states: “Education is what will enable us to move from a culture of war, which we unhappily know only too well, to a culture of peace.” However, this positive potential of formal education is yet to be realised in the different levels of global society. Historically, formal schooling in many societies in Africa has arguably been a vehicle for the perpetration of violence, both in overt forms of physical violence and in terms of psychological and structural violence, as demonstrated in the dehumanising social relationships experienced by the learners in traditional school systems (Harber, 1996:152). This is the legacy of the authoritarian type of school organisation and of the curriculum institutionalised in the first part of the 20th century, which came to be regarded as “normal”, with the indigenous cultures adopting the same model post-independence (Harber, & Sakade, 2009:172). The situation is not limited to Africa only. Harber & Sakade (2009:172) claim that, in terms of schooling, the overwhelming evidence is that the dominant or hegemonic model globally, with some exceptions, is authoritarian rather than democratic. They argue that there is no emphasis on democracy, human rights and critical awareness in the majority of the schooling systems. The degree of the authoritarianism may vary from school to school or from context to context, but the common practice is that what is taught and learned, how it is taught, where it is taught and when it is taught is decided by government officials and head teachers, with hardly any input from the learners.

In such situations, the learners are vulnerable to violence and they are exposed to potentially violent beliefs, since the dominant norms and values of the society are there to be shared, but not to be challenged (Harber & Sakade, 2009:173). The system of education then serves to entrench conformity. Hence, formal schooling has served to reproduce the existence of unequal socio- economic and political relationships in countries like Britain (Curtis 2007).

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Harber and Sakade (2009:171) identify some of the overt forms of violence sustained in normal systems of schooling as racial and ethnic prejudice, bullying, gendered violence, the use of corporal punishment, physical and mental stress caused by over-testing and militarisation of schooling as part of the curriculum. The perpetuation of violence, as characterised by the schooling system, is attributed to the fact that historically, there has always been a conflict between education for control, in order to produce citizens and workers who were conformist, passive and politically docile, on the one hand, and those who advocated for education for critical consciousness, freedom and democracy, on the other hand, with the former dominating the real world of formal education (Harber & Sakade, 2009:173). Thus, the approach to curriculum planning can be described as rationalist, with knowledge seen as factual and objective, rather than subject to interpretation or change. Such a curriculum has been founded on an authoritarian culture, with the emphasis on certainty or knowledge as absolute and unchanging.

Harber and Sakade (2009) argue that the above factors contributed to the schooling system being regarded as one of the institutions of social control just like prisons, hospitals or factories. They are also emphatic that, even today, globally, school organisation and the curriculum still very much reflect the original historical purposes (Harber & Sakade, 2009:174). It is for this reason that education has not been able to catalyse the transformation of communities into more peaceful ones. As the consequentialist approach to education would suggest, what we teach and how we teach have an effect on shaping the sort of society we live in (Smith, 2004:4).

As mentioned earlier, the societal culture of violence has spilled over into schools (Salmi, 2009:399). Schools have become the medium for propagation of the same. For example, in societies with a highly individualistic and competitive worldview, schools emphasise the belief that everybody has the opportunity to pursue their own success (Staub, 2003:6). The school system, by default, also allows a culture of anxiety to prevail through its emphasis on tests and exams as an end in themselves. The purpose of each learning cycle is solely to prepare for the next cycle and the anxiety to pass tests replaces the pleasure of learning (Salmi, 2009:407). In countries like Kenya, because of the high stakes attached to examinations, students have to rely on private tutoring, outside of school hours, to complement their academic preparation. Consequently, students experience stressful schedules in their normal school life.

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Education is meant to be a socialistic process and the activities in schools are supposed to support this process. If this was the case, schools would ideally be sanctuaries of peace and harmony. The reality in many South African and African schools, however, has been different (Maxwell et al, 2004:107). For example, although several constitutions out-law corporal punishment, it continues to be practiced in many schools, in many countries. That brings into question the integrity of the teachers involved. By using the cane on learners, who know that corporal punishment is prohibited, teachers are is not only teaching violence, they are is also teaching impunity. The violent contexts in such school environments do not help promote the teaching of skills and attitudes that would enhance peace in the society.

Every school needs to have in place, the ethos and policies that would allow proper channelling of grievances and solving of conflicts. Learners should feel like their voices would be heard whenever the need arises. Any rules should also be clearly explained. The school should always increase awareness of the prevailing worldviews by critically analysing such processes as discipline procedures, grouping patterns, evaluation techniques, teacher-student interactions and the very language used by professionals in describing the environment and students (Marshall, 2002:13). This is because significant differences between the worldviews of teachers and the students’ worldviews lead to conflict-based classroom interactions that may be reflected in students’ behaviour such as boredom, demotivation or a hostile or indifferent attitude to learning activities.

The curriculum content, which promotes the worldview of “us” and “them” on issues such as nationality, culture, ethnicity or race, also contributes to violence in society. Although education should be carried out with the local context in mind, the vision of a school system that is based on the democratic ideals of justice and equality should be reflected in all curricular content in all countries, in the post-modern world.