From the passing wake of the colonial era and the Cold War, ethnic and religious conflicts have reemerged as one of the most significant threats to the internal stability of many states as well as peaceful relations between states. The last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first have borne witness to a renewed emphasis on expressions of nationalism defined in terms of religious and ethnic identity. In the rubble of the former Yugoslavia, Serbian nationalists slaughtered Bosnian Muslims as both sides attempted to carve out independent states based on ethnic, and to some degree, religious differences. In the Russian Republic of Chechnya, a war of independence took on a religious dimension as Chechen Muslims sought support from radical Islamic movements and the Russian government attempted to portray its engagement there as one of the fronts in the worldwide “war on terrorism.” Violence between Hindu nationalists and Muslims in India has claimed thousands of lives in terrible spasms of ethno-religious hatred. The world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia, was troubled for decades by its own Islamic insurgency in Aceh, Muslim–Christian violence in the Moluccas, and the threat of Islamic extremism in Java. Meanwhile, resistance among the Muslim Uighur people of China’s Xinjiang province to government policies make the international news.
Each of these conflicts is, of course, different. Each one emerges from and responds to its own complex historical, political, cultural, and religious context. However, there are important similarities. Many of them, for instance, have emerged in ethnically diverse states that are themselves artifacts of colonialism, either of the West or the former Soviet Union. That imposition of colonial power established hierarchies of the colonizer and the colonized, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressor and the oppressed that inspired, dialectically, nationalist aspirations in subject peoples throughout the twentieth century.1 During the Cold War, these anticolonial struggles were often expressed within a Marxist-inspired ideological framework that saw imperialism as the inevitable culmination of Western capitalism. However, the disappointments of national independence and Marxism’s erosion of credibility after the collapse of the Soviet Union have led many in formerly colonized countries to turn to alternative ideological frameworks for the expression of legitimate grievances and the struggle to realize communal aspirations. In many instances, this has meant a turn to religious and ethnic identities long suppressed by postindependence nationalisms premised on the meaningfulness of states defined by colonial borders.2 While it would not be accurate to say that any of these conflicts are purely religious in nature, it is fair to say that in each of them, religious differences are mapped onto ethnic, political, linguistic, and class differences in ways that seem to make them more virulent and perhaps intractable. In 1903, at the height of the colonial era, the great African-American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois declared that the problem of the twentieth century would be the “color-line,” a problem intimately intertwined with colonialism, as he and later anticolonial intellectuals would come to recognize.3 One century on, it seems reasonable to ask whether the problem of the twenty-first century will be the religion-line.
The Role of Education
What, we might ask, has education to do with such matters? Surely armed rebellions and terrorism are military and law enforcement problems , not the responsibility of schools. Surely political questions of independence, democratization, or human rights are the purview of political leaders, not teachers. Economic policy makers are surely better equipped to address matters of poverty, economic underdevelopment, and unemployment than educational policy makers. And questions of religious belief and attitudes are widely seen as off-limits for public education in many modern democratic states. What does education have to do with any of this? A lot. Education and educational policy, while certainly not the only or even the main factor, are nevertheless significant players for good or ill in such conflicts.
The significance of education in such contexts stems from its function and location in society. Along with families and religious institutions, the school is an institution charged with the socialization of the young into the life of the larger community and society. It sits at the nexus between the private world of the family and the public world of the state and holds within its walls that which is most precious to us—our children. Thus, education is inevitably a contested terrain. Because of this, it offers a unique window to the fears and aspirations of a society. It offers insight into what a community wants to change in itself, what it aspires to be, and the nature of the disagreements over just what these points are. As an institution of the state, public education is an instrument for the expression of state authority, the inculcation of national identity and loyalty, and the implementation of state policies designed to effect social control and change. The school is as ubiquitous an outpost of the state as the military camp in most nations.4 It is an outpost largely occupied, however, by local people, and thus, its impact is influenced as much by their aspirations as by the intentions of the state. And local intellectuals—educators—who face the challenge of mediating, transmitting, and translating between the political center and periphery and from the present to the future, staff it. While it is no sole cause or panacea, education can play an important role in exacerbating or mitigating social conflicts. Thus, inquiry into the role of educational policy and its relationship to ethno-religious conflict is relevant to understanding and responding to them.
The Case of the Muslim Philippines
The southern Philippines provides a uniquely illustrative case of the challenges faced at the intersection of postcoloniality , ethno-religious conflict , and educational policy . Spain arrived in the Philippines in the mid-sixteenth century and proceeded to establish its colonial rule over what had been up to that time an archipelago of more than 7000 islands and dozens of distinct cultures and languages. Spain’s colonial rule lasted for more than 300 years and led to the dominance of Catholic Christianity in most of the islands and the profound influence of Spanish culture on indigenous cultures. Spanish territorial claims and administrative policies in the region, in effect, defined the territorial identity of the modern Philippine state; it, in effect, created the Philippines.5 As Spanish power and influence were spreading westward around the globe, Islam had been spreading for centuries beyond the Middle East and into Southeast Asia, including the southern Philippines. Therefore, when Spain arrived in the Philippines, it encountered what it perceived as an old enemy—Muslims—whom it promptly dubbed “Moros.” Thus began three centuries of conflict between a Christianized, Spanish-controlled colonial government bent on extending its control throughout the Philippines and the Islamized ethnic groups of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago equally bent on preserving their independence. The resulting dichotomization of the country between Christian and Muslim bedevils Philippine society to this day.6
Spanish colonization did more to give birth to the modern Philippine state than simply define its territorial boundaries. It also contributed, dialectically, to the emergence of a sense of Filipino identity and nationalism that would struggle to transcend ethnic and linguistic difference and inspire a struggle for independence that had been largely won by 1898. This nascent Philippine state was crushed, however, by the US invasion and occupation of the islands during the Spanish–American War. This new colonization came at the expense of Philippine independence and hundreds of thousands of Filipino lives. However, what is more important for this study is, perhaps, the fact that the US colonization included the military muscle necessary to make good Spain’s territorial claims in Muslim Mindanao and Sulu. In a series of military engagements that, according to one contemporary observer, exceed the Indian Wars of the American West in terms of frequency and severity of combat, the United States largely subdued Muslim Filipinos by the first decade of the twentieth century and brought them under the effective rule of a Manila-based government for the first time in their history.7 Thus, what had by then become known as “the Moro Problem” became a perennial problem for the successive Philippine governments. Muslim Mindanao became, in effect, an internal colony, and Muslims became a subordinated and largely despised minority w...