Schools in conflict zones

Ridhima Garg

Every morning at the school, children are cheerfully welcomed inside the classroom by two teachers. Throughout the day these children learn different languages, work in groups, show their work, and also cheer their classmates on completing any task. They go to the teachers when they need help. During lunch or play time, they also play and eat together at the school’s playground.

This might seem like a description of a typical day in a school, but this school is different. It’s different for one simple reason: by design, it takes in children from two different cultures: Arab and Jewish, trying to keep the ratio balanced. There are two teachers in each classroom: one who speaks Arabic and the other who speaks Hebrew. Together, they make their classroom bilingual and culture-inclusive. There are also two co-principals, Jewish and Arab. This is an integrated school in Israel supported by the Israeli Ministry of Education. There are only handful of such schools in Israel. Similar schools also came up in Northern Ireland where conflict between Protestants and Catholics have created divisions in the society. At both places, the integrated schools came up out of concerns about segregation and social isolation. These were built so that the children could develop trust and friendships across cultures. They commit to values of equality and co-existence for everyone (Bekerman, 2018).

Children growing in an environment of conflict is not unheard of in our times. These situations of conflict have severe social and psychological repercussions for the children. We would however want the children to be protected from the miseries of the adult world. Schools are expected to provide safety from the harsh realities and ills of the society. We hope that the children will grow up free from the negative prejudices and stereotypes of the society they are a part of. We also hope that they grow up in a better world and as better people, away from the conflict and violence. However, often while acting through these reasons, the schools become distant and indifferent to the issues they should address. The children are prohibited from talking about these issues in schools. The problems, tensions, and troubles are seen as realities outside the purview of the school’s task of education.

Without a conversation between the school and the neighbourhood, the children end up living in two different worlds; worlds that do not meet. As of now we know, that in such a scenario, for most children, the school ends up having very little to no influence in their sense of living in and understanding of the world. For the children who live in harsh environments or those who belong to underprivileged families, the ‘real’ life ends up staying outside and away from the school. Schooling becomes an everyday chore and several children often don’t see the point of it. For the children from the families of social and economic affluence, schools end up promoting ideas about a society which are far from reality. The bubble of security extends from the family to neighbourhood to the school. These children aren’t exposed to the diverse lives of the people around them and the various ways in which hardships shape their lives. In both cases, the children do not develop a healthy way of participating in the society as active citizens.

It becomes a cultural responsibility for the schools to create a safe space to not just protect the children but also initiate conversations about the structural issues and everyday experiences of conflict. Of course, in a carefully designed and appropriate manner. That the children don’t know what’s going on and that they aren’t concerned by it is probably a myth. Children are a part of the social environment and consequently take part in all that surrounds them. They make their own theories to explain the events based on all the information they have from all the sources in their environment. Negative prejudices in children have been found to develop as young as four years old (Gupta, 2008). If peace and coexistence is one of our goals in any such scenario, its only necessary that the children learn to regard other people as humans first and understand the experiences of others along with their own.

In Israel and Northern Ireland, the integrated schools become the places where during the initial formative ages, the children in their everyday living see and develop an understanding of the ‘other’ group. There are a couple of things happening here.

First, a situation is created for the children from diverse backgrounds to come in social and psychological proximity: they do their tasks together, often in teams towards a common goal on an everyday basis. Gordon Allport’s theory of contact says that this breaks several negative prejudices and stereotypes about the people who are different from one’s own self. Instead of what anyone has heard about the ‘other’, their mind relies more on the immediate experience of a good and shared time together. And this happens throughout their schooling which builds friendships, comfort and strong memories of good times with people of different groups.

Second, when the children from different cultural backgrounds study in the same school, it creates an institutional common identity of belonging to a formal group. This slowly also can translate into developing an over-arching identity of human beings which can become stronger than the immediately available social group identities into which the children are born. The common identity doesn’t take away from the group identity but becomes the source of also feeling affiliated with the people of other groups.

The graduating children from these schools in Israel and Northern Ireland have gotten more interested in their roots and identities. In addition, the integrated school experience throughout their childhood has made them more aware of the nuances of the complex scenarios that they live in. They have developed the attitude to not look at the issues in a simple black and white manner, but to question the popular narratives and to be sensitive to the sufferings of all the groups involved in the conflict. There were visible lesser evidences of these children to have grown up to become closed to the other groups’ narratives or engaging in simplistic narratives of hate and antagonism (Bekerman, 2018; Gallaghar, 2016).

The comparative studies of integrated schools in Israel and Northern Ireland show that while the schools in Israel emphasize recognition of multiple identities and understanding the complexities they hold, those in Northern Ireland focused on the value of respect towards everyone. The intention at both places was to make schools inclusive and to develop the abilities in children required to be in such a school and society. Both recognition and respect are seen as important aspects in the spirit of reconciliation between the communities. (Ben-nun, 2013)

Integrated schooling has been found to be a largely successful endeavor in areas of segregation. It isn’t easy to create and run these schools. In situations like Israel where the conflict is still an everyday presence, there is hardly much institutional support for them. In Northern Ireland although the government institutions too are committed to the task of peace-building through education, the cultural bridges are difficult to construct. The memories of sufferings, violence and the feeling of victimhood linger on even after the peace treaties are signed at international forums. In conflict ridden societies, often the neighbourhoods are also segregated. In addition, the existing school infrastructure and the education system cannot be completely overhauled. It was realized that not every school can be easily transformed into an integrated one. Consequently, in Northern Ireland with the purpose of developing better inter-cultural understanding and relationships, campaigns like Education for Mutual Understanding have led to more contextual initiatives like cross-school, inter-cultural collaborations as simple as a sports events or camps over the holidays.

It is almost an uncontested idea today that education should be made inclusive for all. This becomes a necessity in the light of the realization that any and every region would be multi-cultural and hence children would bring in different cultures within the school and the classroom. The socio-political change one is envisioning in the society cannot happen overnight. It requires conscious actions taken on an everyday basis for a long time. The task of social change is that of cultural change which also includes behavioural change. This task cannot just be limited to the students as well as the Israel and Northern Ireland cases tell us. The principals and teachers in integrated schools have shared that they have to constantly work with parents and grandparents of the children to explain to them the schools’ vision and bring them on board through activities like family picnics and celebrating festivals. The schools will have minimal success if the belief systems and behaviours of parents don’t change as well. No two integrated school models in these places are the same. All of them have come up as a response to and in cognizance of the different contexts of the neighborhoods.

How does one think about it closer home in our own contexts? In a disguised manner, the social conflicts in India reproduce through schools which stratify and segregate children on the basis of economic class, caste, religion, gender, geography, etc. The public schools that are supposed to be common schools for all children are now accessed by the children in the lower socio-economic groups only. Minority group run institutions segregate children on the basis of their ethnicity while some schools also segregate on the basis of gender. The classes as a consequence might appear to be more or less homogeneous while actually being part of a system of segregation in the larger picture of the Indian society. Learning from the efforts of Northern Ireland, the schools could start conversations and initiate projects with other schools and in the communities around them to develop awareness and sensitivity to different cultures while also encouraging friendships.

It’s also not the case that the India today is free of all visible and violent conflicts. Tensions between different communities have grown in several parts of India as a consequence of many factors. There are regions in different parts of India which are now commonly understood as riot-prone areas. Lessons can be drawn from Northern Ireland and Israel to create schools as safe spaces for initiating cross-cultural dialogue and developing empathy towards the narratives of communities different from our own.

One finds that raising the question of the relationship between schools and their neighbourhoods, both immediate and far, raises a couple of questions about the purpose of the school in any place and how the school should achieve it. The questions can be made specific: What should the purpose of school be in an area where there is visible or hidden conflict between people from different communities or cultures? If there is a purpose to nurture a certain kind of human being, there is also a necessity to envision a kind of society which can house these human beings. One will have to face the necessity of imagining schools and education in broader frameworks than just the currently popular goals of literacy and numeracy. Probably all of us will need to acknowledge at some point that since there is no one size fits all kind, there cannot be one model of school which can be built everywhere.

Schools probably cannot solve the larger problems. But that doesn’t mean they can shy away from the need to acknowledge them and not become institutions of social moral compass in their own neighbourhoods. The interventions in Israel and Northern Ireland prove to be the standing and struggling examples for all of us in this direction to learn from.

References

1. Bekerman, Z. (2018). The graduate(s): The harvests of Israel’s integrated multicultural bilingual education. Race Ethnicity and Education, 21(3), 335-352.
2. Ben-Nun, M. (2013). The 3Rs of integration: Respect, recognition and reconciliation; concepts and practices of integrated schools in Israel and Northern Ireland. Journal of Peace Education, 10(1), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400201.2012.672403.
3. Gallagher, T. (2016). Shared education in Northern Ireland: School collaboration in divided societies. Oxford Review of Education, 42(3), 362-375. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2016.1184868.
4. Gupta, L. (2008). Growing Up Hindu and Muslim: How early Does it Happen? Economic and Political Weekly, 35-41.
5. Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2005). Allport’s Intergroup Contact Hypothesis: Its History and Influence. In J. F. Dovidio, P. Glick, & L. A. Rudman (Eds.), On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty years after Allport (pp. 262-277). Blackwell.

The author is a doctoral student of Education in Dr. B R Ambedkar University, Delhi and can be reached at rgarg.20@stu.aud.ac.in.