Education equals peace. The west needs to learn from disasters of the past

By Lauryn Oates, For The Calgary Herald

Five kilometres outside the town of Gulu in northern Uganda, down what barely qualifies as a road -- a long stretch of deep potholes filled with muddy water -- lies the Gulu Primary Teachers College.

Here, peace finally prevails and faculty and students have rejoined the reopened college, now sitting in an area that a few short years ago was controlled by the Lord's Resistance Army, infamous for its use of child soldiers, mutilating and brutalizing its victims, abducting children in the night, and enslaving thousands of women into sexual submission as "bush wives."

A plethora of non-governmental organizations, UN agencies and local organizations have cropped up, as is typical of any conflict or post-conflict zone where funding is made available for a daunting reconstruction effort. Crooked, hand-painted metal signs crowd all the main roads, showing whose in Gulu: a universe of acronyms for hundreds of agencies fighting everything from malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS to violence against women and youth unemployment, and dozens of signs for foreign-funded peace building projects.

Yet the most sure-footed strategy for building peace -- education  -- seems conspicuously missing from the language of the signs. And judging by the location of the main teacher training institution for the north, on a backwater swath of undesirable land inconveniently distant from the otherwise very compact town of Gulu, it must be asked whether education is considered a priority at all, by the Ugandan government or its international financiers.

Out at the teachers college, rudimentary one-room classes speckle the property. There is a mostly defunct computer lab, once funded by USAID, but now housing a few poorly functioning computers competed over by the college's 500 students. The lab's manager, Denis Godwins, occasionally removes a poisonous snake wrapped around the doorknobs when he arrives in the morning, a holdover from the land's recent life as a hastily removed patch of jungle. The college is too far out of range to get Internet service. It has struggled to attract donors to meet basic needs like books and staff. There's no library on site, and little commercial activity in the area. Power outages are frequent and there is no generator for a backup source.

The situation in northern Uganda is sadly typical. Education is but one sector among many competing for attention and funds, in a complex international mission with many players.

Yet education is not just any sector -- it's the very best bet a country recently immersed in violence has to not revert to the terrors of the past. A strong, quality public education system will keep a plug on the last war in Uganda and stop new wars from beginning.

There is an abundance of scholarly evidence attesting to the link between education and peace. But you need not consult the statistics. Simply take a look around. It is no coincidence that the countries of the world with well-funded, high-quality, free, universal primary and secondary education are those that are not embroiled in bloody conflicts.

It should be intuitive that places with a surplus of disenfranchised, illiterate young men, chronic poverty, and a lack of opportunity, and a deficit of schools and books, are going to be more prone to allowing dissatisfactions to explode into violence.

The Taliban of Afghanistan are but one example proving this link. The Taliban were birthed from the absence of educational opportunity. Into the void rose madrassas founded by extremist Islamists who mixed the rote memorization of the Qu'ran with weapons training and systemic sexual abuse, recruiting from among Afghan refugee camps, orphans as well as poverty-stricken Pakistani families. Free room and board was an attractive offer to strained parents who welcomed one less mouth to feed. And the Taliban, for their part, found a ready-made army of fanatics: armed, traumatized kids who could no longer remember their mothers, or the love and warmth of any females for that matter. They swallowed whole the Taliban's trademark misogyny, their doctrine of intolerance and xenophobia, and a belief system that made one view blowing oneself up to be both honourable and rewarding. It was the perfect war machine. And it started precisely where education failed. Today we reap the consequences.

And yet we make the same mistakes even now. In Kabul, the nicest, newest buildings that have been constructed during the post-Taliban years are not schools but mosques. Saudi Arabia and Iran have left their legacy in Afghanistan, in the form of shimmering, serene and extravagant tiled odes to religion. It's taken eight years for western-funded textbooks to make their way to schools around the country, in a process that remains incomplete. There is a dire shortage of teachers just as enrolments are at a record high. Most schools have two or three, and up to four shifts per day to accommodate the overcrowding, meaning that children spend as little as two and half hours in the classroom. Few schools have even basic science lab materials or school libraries. What will be our legacy in Afghanistan?

Teachers shoulder the heavy burden of moulding the people who will inherit their country into effective stewards of the future, a future that is ideally, peaceful. Shouldn't the institution that trains teachers be where the greatest investments are made in any reconstruction effort? Shouldn't education be placed above all else when donor countries like Canada are determining how to strategically spend official development assistance in countries where the foundations of peace remain shaky? Education is not just one more item on the menu to choose from; it is a long-term security strategy. Funding education means choosing peace.

Lauryn Oates is a Canadian human rights activist and development worker, specializing in education in conflict zones. She is currently in Uganda working on a study examining the potential of information communications technologies for primary school teachers, with the University of British Columbia

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