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Consider some of the conflicts bubbling or boiling in the world today, and then plot where education – both schooling and less formal means of learning – fits in. Is it a victim, suffering from the conflict or perhaps a target of violence or repression? Maybe you see it as complicit in the violence, a perpetrator, so to speak. Or perhaps you see it as a liberator, offering a way out of a system that is unjust in your opinion. Or just maybe, its role is as a peacebuilder.

Those scenarios are the framework in which Tejendra Pherali, a professor of education, conflict and peace at University College London, researches the intersection of education and conflict. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Pherali discusses the various roles education takes in a world of violence.

“We tend to think about education as teaching and learning in mathematics and so forth,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds. “But numeracy and literacy are always about something, so when we talk about the content, then we begin to talk about power, who decides what content is relevant and important, and for what purpose?”

Pherali walks us through various cases outlining the above from locales as varied as Gaza, Northern Ireland and his native Nepal, and while seeing education as a perpetrator might seem a sad job, his overall work endorses the value and need for education in peace and in war.

He closes with a nod to the real heroes of education in these scenarios.

“No matter where you go to, teachers are the most inspirational actors in educational systems. Yet, when we talk about education in conflict and crisis, teachers are not prioritized. Their issues, their lack of incentives, their lack of career progression, their stability in their lives, all of those issues do not feature as the important priorities in these programs. This is my conviction that if we really want to mitigate the adverse effects of conflict and crisis on education of millions of children, we need to invest in teachers.”

A fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Higher Education Academy, he is a co-research director of Education Research in Conflict and Crisis and chair of the British Association for International and Comparative Education.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: A large-scale research program is currently underway examining the connection between two things, education and conflict. Tejendra Pherali teaches at University College London, and is co-director of ERICC, Education Research in Conflict and Crisis. Tejendra Pherali, welcome to Social Science Bites. 

Tejendra Pherali: Thank you very much for having me, David. 

Edmonds: Today’s focus is on the link between education and conflict. They’re not obvious bedfellows. How did you get interested in the connection between the two? 

Pherali: I think there are two responses to your question. The first one is more personal and the second one is more academic, I think. The personal response to that is that I originally come from Nepal, which was hugely affected by violent conflict and Maoist insurgency in the late 1990s and until 2006. Having lived in a conflict-affected context and having seen the violence and clashes between the military and rebels affecting school education, and schools were directly targeted for violent attacks and students were kidnapped for political indoctrination by the rebels. But also teachers were detained and tortured and taken away and forcefully recruited in insurgencies, as well as the state also persecuted teachers who were suspected of collaborating with the rebels. So having seen that, I was quite interested in trying to understand the impact of violent conflict on education. So that was kind of a personal motivation.

More academic motivation was that in 2000, when the global declaration on universal access to primary education was convened, a lot of international organizations came together in Dakar in Senegal, to launch the education for all goals. Quite a lot of these organizations working in conflict-affected contexts, realize that violent conflicts were one of the major barriers to enabling universal access to primary education and therefore, governments, international agencies needed to develop a different kind of more tailored approach mechanism and funding strategies in order to mitigate those barriers to education in those contexts. And therefore, Interagency Network for Education in Emergencies was set up. Clearly, people who are trained in education, trained well about teaching methods, curriculum development, education, financing, and policies, found themselves suddenly in extremely violent situations where schools were being attacked by militants, or children were being kidnapped or killed on the way to and from school. Textbooks were burned or teachers were taken away while they were teaching in the classrooms. So there was a lot more in there to understand for educationists, which actually justified the advent of the subfield of education and conflict.  

Edmonds: I want to come back to the actual impact on education of conflict. But before we get there, can education predict conflict? Are there education patterns or factors that you can identify which lead one to suspect that conflict might be around the corner?  

Pherali: I think yes. One of the crucial issues relating to the potential of education to predict violent conflict is a distribution of education and the political motives that underpin the educational processes, whether it is education policies, pedagogies, the educational workforce, or access to education more broadly. These kinds of processes can create educational inequalities, which predict inequalities in social, political, and economic outcomes in the society.  That leads to forms of grievances for those who can’t actually benefit from education and other domains. 

Edmonds: You mean one group having much better resourced schools than another group, for example. 

Pherali: So that’s one of those. For example, certain social and cultural groups have better levels of access to education, and therefore outcomes. I can actually think about an example from my own native Nepal, where high-cost Hill-based ethnic groups had better access to education. The whole processes of nation building historically, have been monopolized by privileged social and ethnic groups. And educational processes have been influenced by those characteristics and aspirations of those groups in a very ethnically diverse society, where there are different kinds of ethnic groups, Indigenous populations, different linguistic groups and cultural groups. They were very much excluded, and were not able to benefit from the opportunity of education as much as the people who actually represented the groups that education actually was characterized by. So that led to unequal participation in political structures, economic inequalities, a whole range of discriminations in social spaces, which actually fueled the insurgency that we saw. 

Edmonds: In some places, it might not be a question of resources. Different groups might choose to send their offspring to different schools or universities for, let’s say, religious reasons, or maybe the function of housing segregation. One example would be Northern Ireland, where even to this day, many Protestants and many Catholics go to schools that are predominantly populated by people of their own denomination. Does that kind of segregation in education predict conflict as well? 

Pherali: I think it does. There are several colleagues based in Queen’s University, Belfast and the University of Ulster, who’ve done quite a lot of work actually on how divided schooling can reproduce social and political divisions in Northern Ireland. And I think that’s probably because of that very divided social environment. Government schools and Catholic schools exist, and they thrive in their own communities and that’s why, I suppose, little appetite for integrated education, which tends to bring communities from across dividing lines together.

There’s also another factor that the political groups or political parties in many contexts tend to get support from their divided communities. It is in the interest of the political groups to keep the social segregation so that their political base is intact. What that does is basically [it] educates different religious groups or cultural groups differently and it actually reduces their chance of coming together in order to engage in dialogue and understand the problems in their society and so forth. So as a result, divided schooling contributes to reproduction of the existing divis