They recalled this as just one of the ways in which schools divided Rwandans rather than bringing them together. This isn’t news to the current Rwandan government. It too argues that schooling under the previous Hutu regimes contributed to the “self-destruction” of the country.
Here’s the rub. While education is vested with great hope and responsibility in post-genocide Rwanda, while reconstruction has been impressive to an education system that was virtually destroyed by genocide, and while public ethnic identification is illegal in Rwanda today, there is much continuity in the school system too. Scholarships for advancement from primary to secondary school, how history is taught, and a number of classroom practices continue to prompt Rwandans to think about themselves as meaningfully different, unequal and diametrically opposed groups, if this time, under the surface. For example, in Rwanda’s schools today, supported by a minority Tutsi-led government, children are learning a historical narrative that dangerously marginalizes much of the Rwandan (Hutu) population.
It ignores most of their losses during the civil war, genocide, and aftermath. Despite students being taught that they are all Rwandan and that Hutu and Tutsi no longer exist, the people I talked to readily identified themselves and their situation by ethnicity without my asking, albeit in confidential, anonymous, one-on-one interviews. Many Rwandans, especially those who self-identified as Hutu, were clear about the injustice of ethnic exclusion which they felt lurked just below the surface of their curriculum. Given the restrictive political context, they were afraid to speak out.
Many Rwandans, especially those who self-identified as Hutu, were vocal about the injustice of ethnic exclusion which they felt lurked just below the surface of their curriculum. This exclusion, and the response it is engendering, should serve as a warning sign of important cracks beneath a shiny post-genocide veneer.
Indeed, schooling can often be considered a microcosm of society. Its structure serves as a reflector of existing societal conditions and its content is not universal and true as we often think of it, but reflecting the understandings of a certain time and place. Schooling can actually amplify those conditions and messages, can be a signal to citizens, and can prompt students to act in certain ways.
As such, the structure and content of schooling could be more systematically included in conflict risk assessments. For instance, in the former Yugoslavia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, politicians of each of the three main groups reformed curriculum such that each group’s history was presented as one of victimhood at the hands of the others. More recently, it is reported that at least since Assad became president in 2000, public schools in Syria have presented Islam as monolithic, with Sunni Islam as the one “true” sect, despite the fact that about 16 per cent of Syrian Muslims are not Sunni. This educational chasm reflects some of the lines of conflict today. It was an early sign of what has come to pass.