Learning in Times of Conflict

An essay by Janet Whitla, EDC President (1981–2006)

As I write this essay, conflicts of nations and ideologies continue to escalate. People of good will are striving mightily to move beyond violence toward a world where negotiation can occur and peace is possible. For EDC, it is a time to remain true to our core obligation—supporting learning wherever we work. We remain passionately committed to this obligation as the way we can best contribute to understanding when cultures are in conflict.

This past year has made ever more clear the deep mutual distrust among major religious and cultural traditions around the globe. We have all been seeking the wisdom to enable us to understand the very different perspectives that fuel today's conflicts. At the same time, we need the courage to confront and reject the beliefs and behaviors of small segments of those societies that inflict terror and tragedy on so many. As the writer Shashi Tharoor put it in describing recent riots in India, violence spawns new hostages to history, ensuring that future generations will be taught new wrongs to set right.

The human and social damage that intransigent dogmas create is one of the saddest manifestations of overzealous belief systems. It is more than ever essential, given the demonstrations of hatred and violence of these times, that EDC remain faithful to its own values and committed to ways of acting. Most fundamentally, we strongly endorse learning that opens people's hearts and minds to others around the world. We reject closed systems.

In a moving essay in The Chronicle Review of April 2002, Anouar Majid asserts the importance of humanities education for all peoples of the world. Such learning is essential, the writer believes, as the foundation for understanding the essence of various cultural traditions:

Even while Muslims and non-Muslims must do their utmost to preserve a world of diversities, we should all remember that our human civilization—as embattled and fragmented as it is—needs to be understood as a common venture. For better or worse, we are one another's keepers.

In the collection of articles linked from this essay, we provide research from EDC projects around the world that emphasize universal principles while incorporating traditions and beliefs from a wide range of cultures. One powerful example is the global curriculum project Exploring Humanitarian Law (EHL). Funded by the International Committee of the Red Cross, this curriculum is a rich investigation of international humanitarian law for secondary school students. It is currently in use in more than 55 countries worldwide, including countries experiencing active conflicts. International humanitarian law defines the rules of "what's fair" during armed conflicts. For example, it outlaws attacks on civilians, on injured and captured combatants, and on medical personnel and facilities. The EHL curriculum brings these principles to life for students by making them specific, relying on the universal pedagogy of storytelling—actual accounts of ordinary people and how they responded to difficult, life-altering choices.

Another example of learning and healing after conflict is the beautiful story of the Butterfly Garden of Sri Lanka's Eastern Province. In the last decade, a group of international donor agencies and policymakers has devoted increasing resources to a new field of research focused on post-conflict education. Much of the research has grown out of field work in Africa, where armed conflict has risen steadily in the past several years. Two years ago, USAID commissioned a background paper to collect case studies and synthesize success stories of educational reconstruction following armed conflicts. The paper has now grown into a book titled How Children Outgrow War, edited by EDC's Ash Hartwell. The Butterfly Garden is an inspiring example of this new field of research and development. As the volume asserts:

Violence occurs quickly, at the slash of a machete or the twitch of a trigger finger. Healing and rebuilding, on the other hand, are slow work. Rebuilding the ecology of learning must go gently . . . day rises slowly from night.

As an American-based institution with a global focus, EDC must be careful not to confuse a Western approach to education with a universal approach. In all of our international work, we push ourselves to understand and to value age-old traditions that take different routes to intellectual, social, and emotional development. The stories of our work in Morocco and Egypt demonstrate the ways in which we help teachers incorporate active learning techniques into cultures and educational systems very different from our own. EDC's Helen Boyle has spent years studying the roles that spirituality and memorization play in Quranic schools in Morocco and in state-run schools throughout the Middle East. Boyle's work in Morocco and Egypt includes strategies to help teachers move away from the traditional "chalk and talk" authoritarian stance toward more student-centered approaches. In Egypt, Boyle and her colleagues have been brought in to expand educational opportunities for rural teachers and students, including a growing percentage of women and girls. It is important to note that EDC's purpose is to help teachers improve the quality of teaching in rural schools, not to "Westernize" them.

Here in the United States, history teaches us that there are enduring challenges to building a just, open society for all our citizens. EDC accepts that meeting these challenges is a mandate for this organization. The nation's growing diversity has already become a defining characteristic for the 21st century. A recent article by Kenneth Prewitt in the Carnegie Reporter has documented what census data reveal about the growing diversity in this country, and its powerful meaning for our future as a nation. (While the article focuses on the United States, I believe it has meaning for our work globally as well.)

The U.S. has become home to people from, literally, every civilization and every nationality, and speaking almost every language. Not in recorded history has there been a nation so demographically complex. So it falls to us, the American citizens of the 21st century, to fashion from this diversity history's first 'world nation' . . . If diversity and discrimination have so often been joined together in American history, will the pairing grow weaker or stronger—will racism and nativism wax or wane—as we become more diverse? . . . We cannot know if the changes . . . will be marked by tolerance and social order or by turmoil and violence. History offers ample evidence for both possibilities . . . A century hence, historians will record of the early 21st century . . . whether the public demanded of itself and its leaders an honest go at figuring out how we can, in fact, live together—justly.

The implications for EDC of these dramatic and continuing demographic shifts are clear. If we are to be a true world leader in education and health, we must attend at every level of our work to that key question: How can the people of the most diverse nation in recorded history live together justly? It will require our own ongoing growth and learning, both as an institution and as individual staff, about what it means to promote full inclusion and opportunity for all in education, work, and health-promoting environments and services. Dozens of EDC projects are dedicated to addressing this question.

One of our responsibilities is to strive to narrow the achievement and opportunity gaps we know exist between more affluent and less affluent communities, and among racial and ethnic groupings. Let me briefly mention two initiatives.

We know that there is unequal access to high-technology tools. One way EDC works to bridge this digital divide is through the America Connects Consortium, where we provide a range of assistance, technical and organizational, to hundreds of community technology centers nationwide. These centers are crucial bridges to the future for many citizens, for they provide computer access and training and economic and employment services in predominantly low-income communities. The America Connects Consortium builds alliances among community technology stakeholders at all levels, from local and regional to national.

We also know that youth in rural settings, despite the many assets of living in small communities, are often isolated, with few options for the future and little or no access to quality health care. This year, the leadership of EDC convened researchers and practitioners who have focused on providing opportunities for these young people [see related story about the EDC meeting on rural youth]. We asked them to think through with us the priorities for research and practice. We are now determining how our expertise can be applied in service of these often overlooked and underserved American youth, and how our role as convener and catalyst can help to mobilize networks of those already committed to rural development.

After September 11th, we felt a deep obligation to address as well terrorism's challenge to our democratic principles and way of life. As President George W. Bush asserted, "In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect"; further, we must not succumb to sowing the seeds of hatred toward innocent groups because of the heinous acts of a tiny minority. Within a week of the attacks, we created Beyond Blame—a middle and high school curriculum designed to help young people move beyond the destructive nature of hatred and wrongful attribution and to think about positive actions they can take in their own lives and communities. In just a few months, Beyond Blame has been widely used throughout this country and in 16 others.

As Beyond Blame typifies, EDC is engaged in the fight against ignorance and prejudice. Our victories lie in gaining access to learning for all—children, youth, and adults. If learning is indeed to be the liberating force in human development and thus the hope for the future, EDC must stand against ideological extremism and exclusion in any form, in the United States as well as overseas. In this spirit, I want the last words of this letter to be those of a great American, W.E.B. Du Bois:

Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought . . . the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental. . . . The freedom to learn . . . has been bought by bitter sacrifice. . . . And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe, but what we do not believe. . . . [S]uch an attitude toward truth [gives the young] a real chance to judge what the world is.

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The human and social damage that intransigent dogmas create is one of the saddest manifestations of overzealous belief systems.

EDC must stand against ideological extremism and exclusion in any form.