Education and the "Three R's" of Transitional Justice: Reconstruction, Repair and Reconciliation

What is the role and importance of education for societies in transition?
In the period following genocide or mass violence, education is often overlooked as a key component of a successful strategy to repair and reconstruct. This reading looks at the significance of education in transitional justice, as well as the approach Facing History and Ourselves has taken in three different countries.
"History education should be understood as an integral but underutilized part of transitional justice and social reconstruction. It can support or undermine the goals of tribunals, truth commissions and memorials, and other transitional justice mechanisms." -- US Institute of Peace Special Report 1
Throughout this website on transitional justice, we have explored how countries use trials, truth commissions and other approaches to deal with painful histories. These strategies are put in place to assign responsibility to individuals, groups and governments for human rights violations. Unfortunately, what many governments leave out of their plans for rebuilding is education. Some governments do include rewriting textbooks or rebuilding schools in their reforms, but they do not often think about the need to retrain teachers and develop new resources and methods for wrestling with a troubled past.

Since 2003 Facing History and Ourselves has been working in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Rwanda. These three transitioning countries are using many of the tools and strategies highlighted on this website. Each of these countries is trying to face a history of violence, division and betrayal. More and more, teachers are being required to teach about the past and to make connections from their histories to contemporary events.

While each of these countries is unique, there are some patterns they share. With this in mind, Facing History has developed an approach that uses an historical case study-often the Holocaust-to illuminate universal themes around human behavior. This approach allows teachers and students to see themselves and their history through another story.

When Facing History began in the 1970s in Boston, Massachusetts, young people were living through a period of grueling racial conflict and violence. Margot Stern Strom, the founder and executive director of Facing History, was also a middle school teacher at that time. She found that her students were able to make connections to themselves, their communities and their country through the study of another time and place. Partly these connections happened because her students were developing skills of historical understanding and were identifying patterns in history. And partly it came from an emphasis on human behavior. Students were able to study, discuss, and analyze the choices made by individuals in the past. They learned to think about their thinking and to make informed judgments. They began to make connections.

Through connections, Facing History classrooms touch upon some of the most sensitive and controversial subjects that teachers are facing in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Rwanda. A Facing History classroom becomes a safe space for the introduction of challenging ideas. And it allows students and teachers a way to face issues that are so close and perhaps painful in relationship to another history, person or event. Importantly the use of connections also allows us to explore what is taking place in the world today. This means that teachers and students in Northern Ireland, for example, will learn about Rwanda, South Africa and Darfur.

Beyond Facing History's resources and strategies, our work in these countries also involves developing vast networks of support for teachers, students and schools. Too often they face huge obstacles and expectations, but little help.


Connections for the Classroom...
  • Some people ask, "when are countries ready to face the past?" The Rwandan government called a moratorium on teaching the country's history following the 1994 genocide. This surprised many people, yet few countries address a difficult past right away. What do you think are some of the reasons the Rwandan government banned the teaching of Rwandan history? Does a certain amount of time have to pass before a society can confront its own painful history? How much?
  • In a recent book, My Neighbor, My Enemy, the authors argue:
    If public education can function to inflame hatreds, mobilize for war, and teach acceptance of injustice, it can be used also as a powerful tool for the cultivation of peace, democratic change, and respect for others...If children living in divided societies can come together in the schools, this contact can be used to help them question their prejudices and stereotypes in their surrounding environment. Where authoritarianism in the classroom fosters blind obedience and militarism, such attitudes might be transformed by educational reforms that promote critical thinking, democratic principles, and the examination of competing views and perspectives. Similarly, if incommensurable conceptions of justice and interpretations of traumatic events have fueled conflict and mistrust, so schools might alternatively provide an arena for examining the past in a constructive manner.2
    What are your thoughts on this position? How can countries in transition work with teachers and schools to develop a message of peace and reconciliation while facing a violent past?
  • Public school teachers are state actors. This means that the education department can be an agent of the state both in efforts to promote exclusion and hate as well as efforts to promote peace and reconciliation. What are the limits and opportunities involved in working with state actors?

 

1 "Unite or Divide? The Challenges of Teaching History in Societies Emerging from Violent Conflict," by Elizabeth Cole and Judy Barsalou. (The United States Institute for Peace), Special Report No. 163, June 2006. Source.

2 "Confronting the Past in Rwandan Schools" by Sarah Warshauer Freedman, Déo Kambanda, Beth Lewis Samuelson, Innocent Mugisha, Immaculée Mukashema, Evode Mukama, Jean Mutabaruka, Harvey M. Weinstein and Timothy Longman. From My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity, edited by Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 226.