Moral education and post‐war societies: the Peruvian case

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Moral education and post-war societies: the Peruvian caseSusana Frisancho a; Félix Reátegui a

a Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Perú

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To cite this Article Frisancho, Susana and Reátegui, Félix(2009) 'Moral education and post-war societies: the Peruviancase', Journal of Moral Education, 38: 4, 421 — 443To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03057240903321907URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057240903321907

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Journal of Moral EducationVol. 38, No. 4, December 2009, pp. 421–443

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Moral education and post-war societies: the Peruvian caseSusana Frisancho* and Félix ReáteguiPontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, PerúTaylor and FrancisCJME_A_432364.sgm10.1080/03057240903321907Journal of Moral Education0305-7240 (print)/0305-7240 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis384000000December [email protected]

This article analyses the unique challenges and needs of moral and citizenship education in post-war Peruvian society. It assumes the explanation of the roots, the facts and the enduring negativeconsequences of violence as described in the final report of the Comisión de la Verdad y Recon-ciliación (CVR) [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] presented to the country in 2003.Drawing on the argument made by the CVR, the paper begins by discussing the fundamental rolethat education played in the expansion of violence. Secondly, and within the framework of theCVR, the article undertakes an evaluation of the current state of Peruvian education, emphasisingthe role and main characteristics of moral and citizenship education within it. Through thisexamination, the many problems and challenges of moral education in contemporary Peruviansociety are highlighted. Finally, the paper presents some general conclusions about the state ofmoral and citizenship education in Perú and the essential and delicate role it should have in apost-war society.

Introduction

Peruvian society lived through a period of internal war during 1980–2000. Numerousand terrible human rights abuses were committed through that period both by thesubversive organisation widely known as the Shining Path and by the state securityforces that confronted it. According to an official investigation about the period ofviolence published by the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR) [Truth andReconciliation Commission] (Perú. CVR, 2004), almost 70,000 people were killedor forcefully disappeared. However, a thorough understanding of the roots and theadverse enduring consequences of violence cannot be limited to dramatic figures ofdeath and personal loss. The social wreckage that large-scale violence entails involvesinstitutional collapse and is interspersed with social values that underlie violence andmake it possible and that are mobilised and transformed by violence itself. One of themost important institutional realms to be examined in connection with violence andwith the consolidation of peace is the education system and, more specifically, that

*Corresponding author: Department of Psychology, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Av.Universitaria 1801, San Miguel, Lima 32, Perú. Email: [email protected]

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aspect of it related to the transmission of a moral perspective to individuals. In thecontext of coming to terms with a violent past, moral education has at least twoimportant goals. As in any other society, it should contribute to building democracyand to constructing the moral conscience of its citizens. But in addition, in a post-warsociety moral education has the very specific and delicate task of helping in theprocesses of political transition, human rights protection, peacemaking and socialreconstruction. It has to promote recognition of others; tolerance of diversity andrespect for differences; inclusiveness; and the capacity to deal with conflict in a non-violent way. Moreover, in a post-war society moral education is charged with the taskof enhancing the capacity of citizens, especially—but not only—adolescents and chil-dren, to think critically about the present and the past, so they can foresee andconstruct a better future. In order to reach these goals, moral education in a post-warsociety has to help people develop the capacity to question implicit and explicit beliefsand assumptions that might be supportive of violence and to construct a criticalmemory of the past so that violence and human rights violations never again occur inthe future.

This article will discuss the challenges and needs of moral education1 in post-warPeruvian society. It will consider, first, an interpretation of the role that the educationsystem played in the development of the process of violence. These considerationswill closely follow the argument made by the CVR, an official investigative body thatworked between 2001 and 2003 to produce a comprehensive explanation of theroots, the facts and the negative consequences of violence. Second, it will make anappraisal of the current state of Peruvian education and of the place and characteris-tics of moral education within it. This examination will reveal to what degree theproblems of moral education in Perú are related both to unsound approaches to theconcept and to some severe institutional shortcomings. Finally, the article willpresent some concluding remarks dealing with the state of moral education in Perúand the role it should have in a post-war society.

Peruvian society, to which this discussion refers, has undergone many significanttransformations in a very short time. It is important to state this because therein liesome of the difficulties of the State institutions—not only the education system—torespond properly to society’s needs and transforming tendencies. Perú is located inthe heart of the South American sub-continent, along the Pacific coast. It has bound-aries to the north with Ecuador and Colombia, to the south with Chile and to the eastwith Brazil and Bolivia. According to the 2007 national census of the InstitutoNacional de Estadística e Informática (INEI) [Peruvian National Institute of Statis-tics and Data] (Perú. INEI, 2007), Perú has a total population of around 29,000,000.Lima, the capital city, is the biggest and most important city of the country;8,447,260 people (26.6% of the country’s total population) live there. Peruvian terri-tory is 1,285,215.60 km2, consisting of 59.9% Amazon jungle, 28.4% Andean moun-tains and 11.7% coast; this makes Perú the third biggest country in South Americaafter Brazil and Argentina. Perú is a multilingual and multicultural country. In fact,Ecuador, Bolivia, México, Perú and Guatemala are the countries with the highestindigenous population density, representing an important part of the enormous

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diversity and sociolinguistic richness of Latin America. It is estimated that there arearound three million people (five years or older) who speak one of more than 40native languages that co-exist in Perú (Cueto & Secada, 2001). Chirinos (2007)states that out of the 3,750,492 indigenous people who have as their mother tongueone of the Peruvian vernacular languages, 3,199,474 are Quechua speakers, 420,215are Aimara speakers and 130,803 are speakers of other native languages, includingthe wide variety of Amazonian languages. However, it is difficult to determine the realnumber of speakers of Amazonian languages since their communities are difficult toreach; for instance, the national census counts 20,000 people of the Asháninka groupwhereas Brack (1997) indicates there are 52,461.

Peruvian basic education has three levels: pre-school years, primary (6 to 11 years)and secondary education (12 to 16 years). By law, ethics and civic education aremandatory for the three levels.

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistical index combining norma-lised measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment and GDP percapita. The HDI sets a minimum and a maximum for each dimension, called goal-posts, and shows where each country stands in relation to these goalposts, expressedas a value between 0 and 1. The 2005 HDI for Perú is 0.773, which gives the countrya rank of 87 out of 177 countries with data (UNDP, 2007).

Post-war societies and school education

There is widespread agreement about the important role that any school system playsin shaping the symbolic structure of a society. When speaking about a society that hasundergone collective violence, this role has a twofold relevance. In the first place, thekind of collective values and representations that are promoted by schools may be ahighly relevant factor in explaining the origins and the conditions that allow for thepossibility of violence. In the second place, understanding the link between the insti-tutionalised values that underlie collective life and massive violence helps in makingproposals for sustainable peace and democracy. This paper argues that both aspectsof the problem lead us to consider the necessity of moral education in post-conflictsocieties and to evaluate the flaws and shortcomings of moral education in post-warPeruvian society. Some useful lessons might be learned from this critical assessment.

Schools are one of the most important places where institutional socialisationoccurs. Different from domestic and everyday life settings, the school system putsinto practice an explicit program of values induction according to a systematic meth-odology and endorsed by State authority. What is transmitted by schools bears theseal of official approval and is enforced by the social rites of examination and grading.Furthermore, school-based socialisation is always a collective experience and for thatreason it carries, as a reinforcing factor, the weight of social vigilance, acceptance ormarginalisation by group peers.

This important role of schools can be understood in the basic and broad sense ofsupporting the internalisation of abstract social knowledge, such as the notion ofimpersonal rules and the existence of the generalised-other or, as Mead (1962, p. 154)

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defined it, ‘the organized community or social group which gives to the individual hisunity of the self’. Schools also produce and transmit symbols of collective relevance,such as those related to the embodiment of the nation or the rituals of religion. Thestrength of this symbolisation is closely related to the official and institutional qualityof school systems. They produce symbols in a systematic way, according to officialideologies and aiming at an audience that needs to adopt them in order to obtain insti-tutional official approval as a skilled person. Schools are thus a sphere of institutionalsymbolisation of society.

Sociological approaches to domination and social control emphasise that schoolsare, at the same time, the place where individuals are brought to adopt values that arefull of specific content and that provide the basis for social conformity, for the accep-tance of authoritative national narratives and for compliance with a given collective(social and political) order. Scholarly discourse on class hegemony, self-enforcedstate ideologies or the understanding of nation-building processes in terms of ‘imag-ined communities’ (Anderson, 1983/1995), is clearly indebted to this conception ofschools and the educational system.

However, as has been already suggested above, the institutional production ofauthoritative symbols and the transmission of collective values that the school systemperforms can be regarded differently. Depending on some specific circumstances, itcan also be a tool for social reform aimed at contesting and modifying the pattern ofdomination and creating the conditions for a more democratic society. Since thevalues and collective representations on which social order rests—such as ideologies,social narratives, consensus on the legitimacy of political institutions, worldviewsunderlying a hierarchical order—are not naturally given, they can be collectivelymodified through the institutions dealing with the symbolic organisation of society.Correspondingly, since the values that the school system transmits are so firmlyencoded in long-standing—even unconscious—social arrangements and since theyultimately live in the realm of subjectivity, they are not expected to change as fullyand swiftly as, say, social legislation or public budget management. In the case ofeducation, though, institutional reform cannot be reduced to a transformation ofnorms in search for efficiency; it has to do with altering the ways in which the forma-tion of human beings is conceived of, which puts the problem, ultimately, in therealm of morality.

Transition as an opportunity for education reform

The role of educational reform in the transformation of society is particularly salientin the case of post-war societies, the kind of societies where previous armed violencehas been put to an end but that are still confronting the problems of peace-buildingand democratic consolidation. Post-war situations are frequently matched with tran-sitional situations. A society in transition is one where some political arrangementsand decisions are being made in order to cope with previous violence, authoritarian-ism, political instability and past wrong-doings, such as massive human rightsabuses. Official truth-telling, special mechanisms for justice, reparations for victims

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and all-encompassing institutional reforms are among the main features of a transi-tional process (Minow, 1998; Teitel, 2000; Hayner, 2001).

Truth-telling mechanisms that are put in place during transitions, such as truthcommissions, can reveal the need for educational reform through an earnestexamination of the roots of violence and authoritarianism. These are mostly officialinvestigative bodies charged with exposing the violent past and pointing out individ-ual and institutional responsibilities as well as promoting State and social recognitionof the victims. Truth commissions have become more strongly committed to produc-ing not only a forensic truth—a legal description of the crimes and an argument aboutwho should be held accountable for them—but also a historical, social and moraltruth. If forensic truth is necessary for justice tribunals to cope with past wrongdo-ings, historical truth deals with the structural, institutional or cultural flaws of asociety that made possible the perpetration of massive violence, the harsh behaviourof armed actors and, in some cases, social indifference to human suffering. Historicaltruth-seeking looks into the fabric of society to ask how atrocity was possible in thefirst place.

The cultural traits of society are not always as evidently linked to war making andatrocious behaviour as we may expect them to be. Between beliefs and actions liesome mediating factors such as economic imperatives, deprivation and politicalleadership. The connection between culture and violence may be clearer in thosesituations where the ethnic cleavages of society are conspicuous—even alleged—motives of exclusion, ill-treatment, distrust or revenge. The genocide in Rwandaduring 1994 (Mamdani, 2001) and current communal and religious violence inIndia (Sen, 2006; Nussbaum, 2007) may exemplify this particular social dynamicwhereby violence is unleashed upon perceived ethnic differences—cultural, reli-gious or even supposedly racial—between coexisting peoples, whenever some politi-cally organised actors are willing and ready to exploit those social perceptions(Tilly, 2003). In other social settings, such as Peruvian society, the cultural roots ofviolence are not as apparent or as instrumentally important for the conflict and theyhave to be sought after with a different approach. Instead of considering them asmotivations for warfare, the cultural traits of society have to be observed as thegeneral context of commission and omission, of violent aggression and the impu-nity granted by State institutions, of the particular strategies adopted by the actorsand of the varied degrees of conformity of public opinion with the human rightsviolations suffered by ‘others’ within the nation. The cultural organisation of soci-ety—which includes dominant values, public ideologies, collective representationsof the ‘other’ and legitimating explanations of inequality—provides the contextwhere the armed actors judge the pertinence, convenience or normality of theiractions. This is important when considering extreme forms of damage, such asmassacres, as a preferred warfare strategy (Uribe, 2004) or widespread sexualviolence against women as a tool for subduing or demoralising male enemycombatants.

Precisely because of their indirect link to violence, these cultural traits are betterobserved as the by-product of some institutional sources of social production, such

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as the school system. This is why national truth-telling processes, when performedboth from a forensic and from a historical perspective, tend to call for institutionalreform of the educational system, in addition to other proposals that may seem moredirectly linked with the urgencies of peace-making, reconciliation and the consolida-tion of democracy. In the Peruvian case, as has been suggested above, the issues ofeducational reform are raised both from an intrinsic assessment of the failures of thesystem itself and from an understanding of the role of education in the expansion ofviolence.

Both approaches call simultaneously for a deep and all-encompassing reform of theschool system. Such a reform should have among its paramount priorities the build-ing of a school system that is useful for promoting social inclusion and civic culture,which would, in turn, be a major asset for sustainable peace and democracy. It is asa key element of this function of education that concern about moral education inPeruvian schools arises.

Truth seeking in Perú and the cultural background of violence

From 1980 to 2000 Peruvian society experienced a period of very harsh armedviolence. The internal armed conflict—as the CVR (2004) defined it—started inMay 1980 when an extremist revolutionary organisation, the Shining Path, decidedto wage war against the Peruvian state. Their purpose, following the lines of theMaoist idea of communist revolution, was to bring about the revolution from theunderdeveloped, mostly poor and rural countryside to the urban centres and, ulti-mately, to tear down the State to put in its place a communist regime. The ShiningPath developed its armed struggle for approximately 12 years, until 1992–1993,when it was finally crushed by state security forces. Three civilian presidents duringfour presidential terms dealt with the Shining Path. During those years, they readilyconceded full authority to the military to handle the problem, which meant puttinginto practice methods that were mostly as ruthless toward the civilian population aswere those of the Shining Path. As a result, during 12 years of terror, thousands ofhuman rights abuses were committed on both sides, while the democratic authori-ties were eager to turn a blind eye to the violations perpetrated on behalf of thestate. The CVR received 17,000 testimonies of victims and direct witnesses ofviolence. As a result of these testimonies, the CVR was able to recover the fullnames of almost 24,000 killed and forcefully disappeared people. The results of theCommission’s investigation were analysed and compared with previous systematicrecords of victims to estimate the actual toll of violence. The Commissionconcluded that the most probable figure of dead and disappeared persons duringthe war was 69,280 (Perú. CVR, 2004). The Commission was also able to make alegal description of criminal actions, which demonstrated that crimes againsthumanity had been committed. The patterns of crimes and human rights abusesdocumented by the Commission include arbitrary executions, forceful disappear-ance, massacres, torture, violence against women, violence against children andkidnapping (Perú. CVR, 2004).

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When the armed threat to state order finally disappeared around 1992–1993,Alberto Fujimori’s authoritarian regime decided to keep in place a counter-subversive policy as a means to affirm its rule against democratic opposition andvarious social demands. President Fujimori was able to maintain an authoritarianrule until the year 2000, when he attempted to gain an unconstitutional election fora third term in office. Although he managed to proclaim himself as winner of the2000 election, the outburst of a major corruption scandal, and the progressiveweakening of international support for the regime, led him to flee the country andto resign executive office.

During the transition from authoritarianism in 2001, many major political deci-sions were made in order to enhance the institutional framework of the incomingdemocratic regime. Among them was the need to pay attention to an old demand ofthe victims of violence and of some important organisations of civil society, such asthose focused on the advancement and protection of human rights. To fulfil thisdemand, a truth commission was created, following the example of many similarinvestigative bodies around the world. The underlying assumption for creating thiscommission was that any attempt at building peace and democracy in the countrywould be unsuccessful unless an earnest confrontation with the past were made.

The CVR was given a very complex legal mandate. It was asked to provide anexplanation of the political and social context of violence, to help identify crimes andcriminal responsibilities, to assess the damage suffered by the victims and to makeproposals for reparation, institutional reform and reconciliation. In terms of researchinto and interpretation of the legacy of violence, this mandate meant that theCommission should produce a ‘truth’ understood both in forensic terms and insocial-historical terms. The description and the explanation of the violence made bythe CVR has been praised by intellectuals, academics, human-rights defenders andvictims as an encompassing, well-balanced and insightful account of the process.However, it has also been challenged by some groups in society, mainly those relatedto the political parties that ruled during the years of violence. In this paper, we followvery closely the interpretations of the facts and the context made by the CVR, onaccount of its wide acceptance among academic researchers and by key officialorganisations involved in the assessment of education in Perú, such as the ConsejoNacional de Educación (CNE) [National Council for Education] (Perú. CNE,2007).

The main factual findings made by the CVR are related to the demographics ofviolence. The actual toll of violence turned out to be twice what had been supposedin previous years. The Shining Path was held to be the major group mostly responsi-ble for those deaths and disappearances. While that terrorist organisation was respon-sible for almost 54% of the victims who were reported to the Commission, the statesecurity forces were mentioned as perpetrators in 37% of the cases denounced to thisinvestigative body. Notwithstanding this disparity, it should be mentioned that boththe Shining Path and the State security forces were involved in crimes against human-ity, mainly perpetrated against the rural population. The CVR’s figures show that75% of the victims were indigenous people, although the indigenous population in

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Perú accounts for no more than 30% of the population as a whole (Perú. CVR,2004).

The CVR also examined the institutional conditions that made large-scale violencepossible. In its Final Report (Perú. CVR, 2004), it presented a careful considerationof the flaws, inadequacies and shortcomings of Peruvian institutional life, understoodas the State norms, agencies and networks aimed at regulating, reproducing andgoverning society during the period of violence. The Commission observed thebehaviour of those institutions mainly responsible for dealing with national securityand domestic order, political representation and participation, administration ofjustice, public services, health care and the school system. This evaluation showedthat the weakness of democratic principles and the intrinsic systemic, normative andlogistic failures of those institutions left the citizenry exposed to numerous anddiverse abuses and prevented them from exercising their rights to life and to beprotected against harmful treatment.

However, for the CVR the institutional flaws that made violence possible mighthave been the expression of deeper national problems that lie in the realm of culture.Elaborating on the over-representation of indigenous people among the total toll ofvictims, the Commission presented a strong argument about the persistence and thepervasiveness of racism in Peruvian institutional and everyday life. Peruvian officialinstitutions as well as face-to-face contacts are shaped by some unwritten hierarchicalrules that can be traced to the origins of the Republic (1821) and even to the symbolicframing of colonial society (sixteenth to early-nineteenth century). Although theorigins, the existence and the actual social effects of racism are a contentious subjectin Perú (Santos, 2002), for the Commission there was no doubt that it had been afactor influencing the patterns of victimisation, the granting of impunity for Stateperpetrators and the social indifference toward the victims.

Racism, nevertheless, is, in the Commission’s interpretation, one element amongmany others that constitute a cultural framework that supports discrimination basedon social origins, gender, language, economic condition and other social and individ-ual characteristics. This is a cultural framework heavily associated with a hierarchicalworldview that sustains a naturalised conception of inequality. Inequality is thuslegitimised and remains uncontested.

The school system and violence

The discussion engaged in by the CVR about the significance of the school systemduring the period of violence evaluates its role in cultural framing in a very broad way,considering it not only from an ethnicity-based viewpoint, but from the perspectiveof the shaping of the political relations among citizens and between them and theState. In short, considering the relations between schools and cultural values leadsultimately to the relations between education and citizenship, understood as anexperience of entitlement to rights that are assumed to be at the core of individualidentities, widely acknowledged and respected in the public realm and, in the end,universally guaranteed by the authority of the State. The critical assessment of the

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institutional, political and pedagogic features of the Peruvian education system priorto and during the violence allowed the CVR to state that schools did not provide thebasic structure of values and practices that underlie citizenship in any society. Thisfailure of the school system to promote citizenship in Perú contributes to explainingwhy an ideology of revolutionary war could be disseminated during the late-1970sand early-1980s and why human life was so vulnerable in the country during thoseyears.

The path leading to this failure, as explained by the CVR, involves three mainaspects: first, the breakdown of the system that accompanied its dramatic growth,which prevented it from delivering on its promises to the citizenry; second, the rein-forcement of traditional pedagogic practices; third, the emphasis on an authoritariannotion of social order, which blocked the transmission of values more connected witha democratic frame of mind and with a complex conception of morality.

According to the CVR, since 1950 dramatic growth of the school system took placein Perú as a response of the State to an old and widespread social demand. However,this growth was not accompanied by systematic planning and funding of publiceducation, which led to an equally dramatic decrease in the quality of the educationprovided to the population. Whereas public school enrolment grew at a rate of 3.4%per year from 1970 to 2000, real public spending, that is, public spending measuredin purchasing power, did not increase during the same period (Perú. CVR, 2004).This situation produced serious damage to many of the constituent components ofthe education-system. Salient among them was the situation of public school teacherswhose income severely deteriorated over the decades, which, in turn, produced alowering of their social status and which, ultimately, ushered in a strong political radi-calisation of teachers’ union organisations. This radicalisation was accompanied byfurther neglect of pedagogic concerns amongst teachers’ organisations and, in somecases, mainly in rural areas, allowed the Shining Path to make strategic inroads in theschool system.

A widely expanded and, at the same time, under-funded school system did notprovide an experience of integration and equality for the deprived population, norwas it an efficient way to access to social mobility. Whereas, according to its moder-nising ideology, the education system tended to inspire the newly increased mass ofpupils with a desire for material progress (Perú. CVR, 2004), it hardly provided themeans to for this to be fulfilled in any significant way. Paradoxically, the expansionof school coverage all around the country demanded a trade-off that turned out to betragic: more school facilities were provided but no classroom equipment and onlyvery low quality teaching. Poorly equipped schools served by poorly trained teacherswere a re-enactment of the long-lasting experience of exclusion and inequality formost Peruvians.

On the other hand, the education system kept its traditional teaching practices andmethodologies and remained committed to a set of values that were far from servingto promote ideas of social inclusion, morality and citizenship among the students.The lowering of Peruvian education standards went hand in hand with the reproduc-tion and deepening of uncritical, authoritarian teaching methods, which relied

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heavily on memorisation and repetition and on the submissive acceptance of institu-tional authority beyond question. As the CVR Final Report states, a traditionalapproach to education (based on rote learning, routine and obedience), which is stillpervasive in Peruvian education, coincided with the intellectual style of Maoism andof the particular messianic and mechanistic interpretation of Maoism tailored by theShining Path’s founder and supreme leader, a former philosophy professor namedAbimael Guzmán Reinoso. In fact, the CVR investigation found that the ShiningPath took advantage of some institutions in the educational system to expand itsproselytising, seeing an opportunity in the teachers’ authoritarian style to offer youngpeople a utopia that provided them with a total identity. This was possible becausein Perú access to school does not mean access to a real system of opportunities forsocial mobility and advancement; inequality remains uncontested and the schoolsystem reproduces the exclusion that pervades all Peruvian society. Classroompedagogy remained heavily dependent on repetition of content and its memorisationby students. The notion of a successful performance in the classroom was closelyassociated with the capacity to produce ready-made responses to the teachers’ ques-tions, a practice that has a twofold significance: it rewards repetition and routine asopposed to critical and independent thinking; and it commends obedience to anuncontested authority as a desirable pattern of social existence. As the CVR (2004)stated, in those schools a tradition prevailed according to which the teacher ‘knows’and the student ‘learns’ and ‘obeys’.

Combined with this approach to education and with its resulting attitudes andvalues, other traits of traditional social order in Perú remained unchallenged—or,even worse, received official, though unintended, sanction—by the system, such asgender relations based on the exclusion or subordination of girls (particularly ruraland peasant girls), as well as unspoken, though pervasive, forms of racism manifestin the despising of local indigenous cultures by state officials and teachers who werethe purported agents of modern enlightenment.

Finally, the education system reinforced the idea of authoritarian relationshipsbetween the State (and any other form of organised power) and the people, mainlythrough a conception of discipline that admitted no challenge to, or criticism or openquestioning of authorities or holders of power. The old tradition of discipline byphysical punishment, still very much alive in the rural scene until the 1970s,resounded well with this entrenched assumption of the Peruvian school system: ‘Laletra con sangre entra’ [‘Literacy grows with the shedding of blood’] (Perú. CVR,2004).

In conclusion, a promise of change and upward mobility, which turned out to bean outright frustration, an intellectual framing that rewarded passivity rather thancritical thinking, a set of traditional values related to a hierarchical conception ofsocial relations and an experience of authoritarian discipline all added up to a schoolsystem that weakened rather than promoted the expansion of citizenship. Toconfront past violence and to get over the process that had made it possible, it wasclear that a very different approach to education should be adopted, an approach thatshould take into account the deep moral flaws of Peruvian society that had been

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reproduced by schools and that had provided a deadly context for violence andhuman suffering.

The general context of Peruvian moral and citizenship education

As early as 1993, an educational diagnosis confirmed that Peruvian education was ina crisis (Perú. Ministerio de Educación, Banco Mundial, PNUD, GTZ, UNESCO-OREALC, 1993). At that time, the main problem was said to be the lack of a nation-wide educational project and, more specifically, the low quality of school textbooks,lack of a relevant curriculum, inefficient school administration, absence of schoolsupplies, inadequate infrastructure in schools and under-qualification of teachers dueto poor teacher training. Ten years later, in 2003, Peruvian education was declaredto be ‘in a state of emergency’ due to the low performance of Peruvian students inbasic skills, such as reading comprehension, writing and maths, as measured not onlythrough national evaluations but also by international evaluations such as theProgramme for International Student Assessment (OECD, n.d.) and The LatinAmerican Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education (LLECE, n.d.).The Programa Nacional de Emergencia Educativa [National Emergency in Educa-tion Program] was instituted in 2003 as a way to combat the deficiencies identifiedas the main problems of Peruvian education, namely that students were not learningthe basic skills needed to act and live socially and that Perú was not educating citizens.The program’s main goal was to reduce school failure during primary and secondaryeducation and to diminish the inequality among students (Perú. Ministerio deEducación, 2008). So—at least as a declaration—the Programa Nacional de Emer-gencia Educativa set as a goal for 2006 that all Peruvian children and adolescents,especially the poorest and more vulnerable, should improve their abilities to read,write and express their ideas and feelings in different languages, as well as developskills to become ethical citizens. Even though the program emphasised the teachingof communication and mathematical skills, it also acknowledged ‘values education’as a deficient area of Peruvian public education and, because of that, recommendedthat different programs and topics aimed at improving social participation, moralreasoning and citizenship should be incorporated into the curriculum. Nevertheless,due to lack of financial resources (Diaz, 2004) and other problems, such as adminis-tration deficits and insufficient comprehension by teachers of what the emergencyreally meant (Cuglievan & Rojas, 2008), this goal was not reached and the emergencyprogram was abandoned in 2006.

Improving the quality of basic education is still the major challenge confronted bythe Peruvian education system. In 2008, United Nations Education Scientific andCultural Organisation’s (UNESCO) Second Regional Comparative and Explana-tory Study (SERCE) also pointed out the deficiencies of Perú’s educational system.This study, whose main objective was to gather reliable data on what primarystudents are actually learning, as well as relevant information on factors associatedwith learning, revealed that Perú exhibits lower than the regional average meanscores in third grade (eight years old) mathematics and reading. Girls and boys

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attending rural schools perform at lower levels when compared to their counterpartsin urban schools. Although the report shows that Perú, Brazil and México exhibitthe largest urban/rural gaps in terms of reading, Perú exhibits the greatestdifference—over 79 points—in terms of rural versus urban school results. Genderdifferences also occur since boys outperform girls in mathematics. In general, accessto teaching and learning are not equitably distributed across the various social stratasince there are significant differences in quality of education between urban andrural schools. This highlights the extreme differences that already exist in otherrespects among Peruvians.

There is an additional factor entering the scene to make the landscape ofPeruvian education more complicated. Perú, like many other Latin-American coun-tries, has a significant indigenous population whose mother tongue is other thanSpanish. Although in recent years a better appreciation of the richness of culturaland linguistic diversity has been developing (Zavala, 2007), the indigenous popula-tion has been historically denied and made invisible. As a result, most of thesevernacular languages are in a very vulnerable situation since day by day they looseground to Spanish. Due to the lack of recognition of indigenous languages and thefact that they are scarcely used in public life, it is common for indigenous parentsnot to teach their native language to their children at home, in the belief that it willbe better for them to only learn and master Spanish and with the hope that this waythey will not be discriminated against. Even though Perú has made some efforts toestablish an intercultural bilingual education (Educación Bilingüe Intercultural[EBI], see http://www.minedu.gob.pe/dineibir/), it is well known that such educa-tion is not producing the expected effect in children (Cueto & Secada, 2003). Theprogram is not successful for several reasons, one of the more important being thatmost of the teachers are neither native speakers of the vernacular languages nor arethey members of the indigenous communities, which means that they do not valuethe cultures and their expressions and poorly integrate language and cultural prac-tices in the classroom learning activities, so failing to socialise children within thecultural values of their communities. It is safe to say that the perception of nativelanguages is ambivalent in Perú. Even though there are people who have a positiveview of vernacular languages and appreciate them as a sign of cultural richness anddiversity, others see them as a liability for development. For instance a study byCueto et al. (2003) shows that among elementary and high school students therewere a significant number who had a negative attitude towards native languages andwho wanted Perú to be a mono-linguistic, Spanish-speaking country.

In general terms, it seems that very little improvement has occurred in Peruvianeducation during the last 15 years. The problems identified in the 1993 diagnosislargely remain, since Perú still has a very low level of achievement in comparison toother countries in Latin America (Perú. Ministerio de Educación, 2002; UNESCO,2008) and is still one of the countries with the lowest educational budget in theregion. Moreover, the perception that different social agents (e.g. entrepreneurs,parents, workers) have of teachers and public education is mostly negative (Guerrero& Salazar, 2001).

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This lack of positive findings is even more disturbing considering the particularcontext of Peruvian society after the internal war to which reference was made in thefirst section of this article. The aftermath of that devastating conflict could bedescribed as a profound moral crisis. In this context, moral and citizenship educationare being rediscovered as the best way to construct community and to help build ademocratic, inclusive and just society. This bears an interesting relationship with therecommendation made by the CVR (2004), which called for an emphasis on educa-tion policies that would transform schools into places where the human condition isrespected and where the full development of the students’ personalities is fostered,leading to the formation of peace-loving citizens.

It is fair to say that there is a tradition of moral and citizenship education in LatinAmerica, especially in the context of human rights and the pursuit of democratic andcivic values (Aldunate, 1994; Magendzo, 1994, Sime, 1994; Misgeld & Magendzo,1997; Sime & Tincopa, 2005; Perú. Ministerio de Educación, 2005a; Perú. CNE,2007). Because of its recent experience of internal war, violence and exclusion, inPerú there is now considerable awareness about the need for an education aimed atdeveloping respect and responsibility, tolerance of diversity, respect for multicultur-alism, democracy and shared communal values (Perú. CVR, 2004; Perú. Perú.Ministerio de Educación, 2005a; Perú. CNE, 2007). To build schools able toprovide students with the experience of attachment to a group, of being cared for andcaring for others, of participation, organisation and collective problem solving is anessential goal already recommended by the CVR as one way to help in the construc-tion of an inclusive and democratic society. Therefore, the need to bring moraleducation into the education system in Perú was emphasised both by the lessonslearnt from violence and by an intrinsic reflection about the nature and goals ofschools made by the education community itself.

In this vein, the national curriculum for basic education (Perú. Ministerio deEducación, 2005b) states that the person should be the centre of any educationalprocesses, which have to be developed to a high standard and with equity, so that allPeruvians, irrespective of their differences, receive the quality of education theydeserve. It also points out that education should be intercultural, so it helps to buildrecognition and appreciation of diversity. Moreover, it is explicitly stated thatPeruvian education has to construct democracy so it educates children and adoles-cents to be tolerant of diversity, respectful of human rights, capable of democraticparticipation and able to exert their citizenship in as many ways as possible. Ethicsis also mentioned, as the curriculum states that education should be developed inan ethical context that encourages moral values and the developing of individualand public moral conscience. The main goals of Peruvian education, it is said in thecurriculum guidelines, are to build a more democratic, just and inclusive society, asociety able to build for itself a culture of peace. These goals and their ethical focusare assumed to be cross-curricular. However, in spite of these declarations, officialrecognition of the importance of moral and citizenship has not had a real impact oneducational practices or policies and very little has been done to fulfil the CVRrecommendations.

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Authoritarianism as a perverse characteristic of Peruvian education

The failure of the contemporary school system in Perú has one additional trait, whichis perhaps even more critical than those previously mentioned. The school systemremains today an environment where exclusion meets with teaching and learningmethods that are in practice a denial of any citizen-like experience. As has beenalready noted, the CVR found a close relationship between this authoritarian bias ineducation and the development of violence in the country.

Unfortunately, this authoritarian character, which is so negative for any educa-tional project, seems to be embedded in the Peruvian imagination. Every now andthen, the Peruvian Congress web page (http://www.congreso.gob.pe) shows draftbills that call for the restitution of militarised education in public schools as a way topromote the love of country, the protection of national interests and the participationof students in the defence of the nation. This education would be the responsibilityof the Defence Minister and would be in the hands of the in-service military.Contrasting with Martha Nussbaum’s (1996) assertions when she highlights the diffi-culties of holding more universal aspirations (such as the recognition of human rightsfor all human beings) when we situate ourselves in particular realms (for instance,ethnic identities or local forms of political organisation), it is assumed that a verystrong military education will lead students to carry out constitutional mandates in ademocratic state responsibly.

This way of thinking has grown among many Peruvians who miss authoritarianismand deplore electoral freedom and critical public consciousness. Historically, it hasgiven support to the most prevalent approach to moral and citizenship education inPerú (Peña & Barrantes, 2007), which has been characterised by a search for respectfor national symbols and heroes, the spread among students of information aboutthe country’s laws and institutions (e.g. the constitution) and the inculcation ofobedience to rules and norms. It has also pervaded everyday school practices, whichare highly rigid and dogmatic. Rational and detailed explanations about the rationaleof school rules are absent and an ethical stance is rarely taken in the schools toanalyse conflicts. Teachers tend to give orders that students have to obey withoutquestioning and mostly stick to school rules without analysing them critically. More-over, schools seem to be impermeable to the real world, as national and internationalevents are rarely discussed in the classroom. For instance, when one of the mostterrible terrorist attacks happened in Lima in 1991, very few school teachers spokeabout it with their students (Trahtemberg, 2003). This culture of silence becamemore entrenched as teachers were permanently afraid of being accused of ‘apologíadel terrorismo’ (a type of crime introduced in antiterrorist legislation, which refers toa discourse that allegedly justifies terrorist activity), a crime considered akin to trea-son and punishable with life in prison, especially in the case of school teachers (Perú.Comisión Andina de Juristas, 2008). The Peruvian State’s tendency to criminalisedissent and personal opinions (Ardito et al., 2008) contributed to drive discussion ofrecent history out of schools. The teachers’ authoritarian style is reinforced by theless than optimum school size of most Peruvian public schools, which tend to be

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large, an attribute that makes them impersonal and works against student achieve-ment, lessens the opportunities to adapt learning programs to individual needs andcontributes to make face-to-face caring relationships more difficult (Glass, 1982).All this is even more concerning since research has identified as a fundamentalattribute of healthy and vital school communities, an ‘ethos of caring’ and respect ininterpersonal relations (Power et al., 1989; Raywid, 1993; Higgins D’Alessandro &Sadh, 1997; Bryk & Driscoll, 1988) and there is strong evidence that among LatinAmerican students school climate is the variable with the strongest impact onachievement (UNESCO, 2008).

Ethical, citizenship and moral education in public schools in Perú: what has been done?

In this problematic and demanding context, there have been some official attemptsto enhance moral and citizenship in Perú. Because of the moral crisis that was thenevident,2 in 2001 the need for moral education was explicitly recognised as a priorityfor the country. Marcial Rubio, the Minister of Education at that time, was personallyinterested in promoting values through education, and at his initiative, a series ofvideos aimed at high school students called ¿y tú qué harías? [What will you do?] wasdeveloped by the Ministry of Education with the objective of giving secondary schoolteachers a tool to redirect moral education toward a more democratic approach,considering that most teachers have very little training or none at all, for assumingthis task. The videos were distributed among public schools but no training wasoffered to teachers for using them in the classroom, which thus undermined theinitiative and brought about its failure. The same thing happened with a set of postersaimed at giving elementary school teachers a resource for working with moral dilem-mas in the classroom: the posters were nicely and cleverly devised and distributed tosome schools, but teachers were never trained to be able to handle them properly intheir classrooms. Both these initiatives are now forgotten.

In 2005, and in the context of the Education Emergency, the then Minister ofEducation commissioned a group of experts to create an ethics education programfor Peruvian public schools. This program, called Propuesta de Formación Ética(Perú. Ministerio de Educación, 2005a) was carried out from a constructivistperspective and was aimed at enhancing students’ capabilities for moral reasoning,perspective taking, emotional understanding and democratic problem solving. It wasinformed by a psychological and philosophical understanding of ethical developmentand proposed a wide range of strategies and activities for schools and classrooms.However, once again the program was not backed up by any appropriate strategy forteacher training and so when the Minister of Education under whose mandate it wasproposed was removed from office, there was a perceived loss of relevance and inter-est in the program, which was also terminated. A good opportunity for promotingmoral and citizenship education in the schools was again lost.

Regarding school textbooks, it is well known that those promoted by the Ministryof Education and used in public schools rarely include a critical and moral

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perspective on recent political events. A study that aimed to identify how school text-books analyse events of the regime of currently prosecuted former president AlbertoFujimori (Chiroque, 2007) found that most textbooks treat this period of Peruvianhistory very benignly. They usually omit infringements of democratic procedures,such as the dissolution of Congress and the illegitimate control over the mass media,saying nothing about human rights violations committed under Fujimori’s rule andfocusing only, usually from a neo-liberal perspective, on the economic achievementsof his government. This fits with the opinion, held by both some lay people andseveral politicians, that it is dangerous to talk openly about the recent past in Peruvianclassrooms and that the books in which recent historic events are mentioned consti-tute a danger and should be removed from educational settings. For instance, thesecondary social science textbook distributed by the Ministry of Education amongpublic schools was recently publicly criticised by Mercedes Cabanillas, a well knowneducator and congresswoman, on the grounds that, when dealing with the period ofviolence, the textbook is purportedly indulgent towards the Shining Path and, there-fore, acts as an ‘apology for terrorism’. From her point of view—which represents theposition of many others, especially people in power—Perú never had an internal war(a term that is used in the book and that is considered by many to be the ShiningPath’s term) but was under the attack of a subversive and criminal group that is seenalone as responsible for the violence. The book is also accused of showing a pictureof a Shining Path street poster that claims that the police and army are responsiblefor genocide (which is seen as disrespectful of the army) and of presenting FidelCastro as one of the most influential political leaders in Latin America’s recenthistory (see Correo, 2008).

However, from a different point of view the book only does what any good schooltextbook should do: it goes beyond rote learning, avoids the memorisation of irrele-vant data, enhances perspective taking and critical thinking through the use of realcases and dilemmas, analyses recent past events and promotes awareness of what theCVR Final Report says. The term ‘internal war’ is seen as legitimate since it representswhat many people—especially the victims—lived through during the period ofviolence. From this perspective, the several critiques made of this particular book arehighly ideological and emotional responses toward a critical period of Peruvianhistory (see Perú21, 2008). This debate reveals that Peruvian society is divided aboutwhat really happened in recent history, how it should be interpreted and acted uponand how it should be included in educational programs.

In general terms, we can say that the official attempts to carry out moral and citi-zenship have been unsuccessful. They have lacked a comprehensive approach to thechallenges of moral and citizenship education in a context of a post-war society.They have been what Nucci (2009) defines as ‘incomplete approaches’ becausethey either lacked a philosophical and psychological definition of what ‘moral’ and‘citizenship’ mean, were not consistent with the natural process of social and moraldevelopment of human beings, did not fit with the dynamics of the daily life of theclassrooms and the schools (in most cases they were thought of as a specific classtopic or course) and most of the time were understood by the teachers as a process

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of socialisation of children and adolescents into the rules and conventions of theschool and the society. Moreover, due to the lack of agreement among Peruviansabout what the period of violence was really about and what the country’s chal-lenges really are regarding social reconstruction, truth seeking and reconciliation,most of these projects and programs lacked a political focus and were naïve sincethey did not appropriately address historical and political aspects of moral andcitizenship education.

The 2004 national evaluation of citizenship education

Finally, it is worth mentioning that, although there have been some informal experi-ences of evaluation of citizenship education elsewhere in Latin America (for instance,see Jaramillo and Mesa, pp. 467–487 and Araújo and Arantes, pp. 489–511 in thisissue) a national evaluation of citizenship education in Perú was carried out in 2004.It was unusual in that it was a cross-curricular evaluation, as, in Perú, citizenshipeducation is not a specific curricular area but a dimension that is supposed to perme-ate all curricular areas and be integrated into school life as a whole. The evaluationwas based on a conception of democratic citizenship with two dimensions: political(democracy as system) and social (democracy as culture and a way of life). It under-stood citizenship as a commitment to justice and to a full exercise of rights andresponsibilities, especially in particular contexts (systems and cultures) in which thereis injustice and where full exercise of human rights is not guaranteed.3 So, in additionto knowledge about citizenship, it also assessed students’ ability to propose demo-cratic alternatives in situations of social or cultural conflict.

The research had a nationally representative sample of 13,708 6th grade elemen-tary school students (11–12 years old) and 14,305 11th grade high school students(16–17 years old), representative of the diverse types of schools that exist in Perú.Overall, results showed that only 0.6% of high school students reached the expectedlevel of knowledge about citizenship, co-existence and civic participation (theexpected level was based on the level of achievement that the curriculum guidelinesset out for every school grade). There were large differences between urban and ruralstudents: 61.1% of rural compared with 39.5% of urban students did not reach anylevel at all, showing an extremely low level of awareness and practically no skills forproposing ideas for democratic problem solving. For instance, students were unableto link the role of the media to the concept of democracy, could not differentiatebetween a democracy and a dictatorship, could not recognise many of their ownrights and responsibilities, were unable to distinguish corruption from honest behav-iour and failed to propose inclusive and democratic solutions for intercultural anddaily life conflicts.

Conclusion

Over the last decades, many Latin American countries, Perú among them, havemade great efforts to strengthen their evolving democratic systems and governments

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in order to avoid regression to violence and dictatorships, one of the mainchallenges facing the region. Although the consolidation of democracy has beentraditionally regarded as a matter of institutional design (Diamond et al., 1997),today it has become clearer that culture—values, world views, morals—ultimatelyconstitutes the fabric of any political and social regime. One of the most effectiveways to attain the kind of culture that sustains democracies is to have an educa-tional system sensitive enough to incorporate into the curriculum educational prac-tices that aim at developing moral consciousness, civic values, respect formulticulturalism and a sense of community among school members. As we haveseen, official Peruvian educational guidelines acknowledge this, as they recognisethat education, which includes moral development and citizenship, is a privilegedsphere for human growth.

As has been described, the CVR Final Report states that violence emerged in Perúamong other things, because the Shining Path was able to use some institutionswithin the educational system as strategic beachheads, employing them as settings forideological and symbolic debate and also because the state neglected publiceducation for decades. Yet the predominance of traditional authoritarian teachingmethods, which were instrumental in the violence, remains alive and mostlyunchallenged.

This leads to the urgent need for comprehensive educational reform dealing withinstitutional, pedagogical, financial, methodological and human aspects of the schoolsystem. What lies beneath this concern is the notion that the school system is one ofthe most powerful devices for the reproduction (and eventually the transformation)of social order. In a society trying to surmount the heavy enduring consequences ofviolence and committed to preventing violence from happening again, a key necessityis to develop individuals with both a clear-cut identity as citizens and a strong moralidentity. Citizenship and participation could certainly be enhanced through formalinstitutional rearrangements, but lasting democracy and peace take much more thanthat: they require that individuals are able to take the perspectives of others, torecognise others (Taylor, 1992, 1994) and to consider them, irrespective of theirdifferences, as their fellow human beings.

If we agree that human development is not guaranteed by our genetic inheritance,but is always produced by the joint activity of people with the help of cultural tools,education has to be seen as not just a simple process of knowledge transmission butas one of amplification of human capabilities (Bruner, 1996). Moreover, followingPiaget (1971) and assuming that knowledge is not merely a product but also aprocess, the role of education in the moral and citizen development of children andadolescents has also to be seen as a process. So, post-war societies, such as Perú, offerinteresting challenges and ample opportunities to think about and put into practicedifferent forms of moral education. Since collective violence in some ways enacts afailure of recognition and since the weakness of democracy is also a matter of moralincapacity to assume the rights and the plight of ‘the other’, the necessity of reshapingthe moral imagination presents itself both as imperative and as self-evident. It is uponthe existence of persons with critical, self-assured, caring and sympathetic identities

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where democracy is to be built and where democratic institutions can be lastinglygrounded.

Notes on authors

Susana Frisancho is Associate Professor, Psychology Department, Pontificia Univer-sidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Perú. She received a PhD in Applied DevelopmentalPsychology from Fordham University, USA. She serves as a consultant to thePerúvian Ministry of Education. Her publications include: La identidad moral:elemento fundamental para una cultura de los derechos humanos [Moral identity: afundamental part of a culture of human rights], Documentos de Trabajo, Serie Democ-racia y Sociedad, 1, 39–48 (Lima, Instituto de Democracia y Derechos Humanos(IDEHPUCP) [Institute of Democracy and Human Rights]), 2007; and Jueces ycorrupción: algunas reflexiones desde la psicología del desarrollo moral [Judges andcorruption: some reflections from the psychology of moral development], RevistaMemoria, 4, 65–72, August (Lima, IDEHPUCP), (2008).

Félix Reátegui is Professor in the Social Sciences Department and Coordinator of theResearch Unit of the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, Pontificia Univer-sidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Perú, where he studied sociology. He worked as Headof the Final Report Unit in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Perú (2001–2003). His publications include: Memoria histórica, política de la cultura y democracia[Historical memory, cultural policy and democracy] in V. Vich and G. Cortés (Eds),Políticas culturales: ensayos críticos [Cultural policies: critical essays] (Lima, Institutode Estudios Perúanos [Perúvian Studies Institute] and Instituto Nacional de Cultura[National Institute for Culture]), 2006; and Aproximación histórica y sociológica ala realidad Perúana: el trabajo de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación [Historicaland sociological approach to Perúvian reality: the work of the Truth and ReconciliationCommission], in: M. Eckholt and S. Lerner Febres, Ciudadanía, democracia y derechoshumanos [Citizenship, democracy and human rights] (Quito, Ecuador, Abya-Yala–Intercambio Cultural Alemán-Latinoamericano [German-Latin American CulturalInterchange]) (2009).

Notes

1. Even though the paper focuses mainly on moral education, some references are also madeto citizenship education. We think of moral education as education aimed at strengtheningmoral consciousness and fostering ethical deliberation, which also includes education for agood and valuable life. Citizenship education is understood as education for participation inpublic life and civic responsibilities. In a post-war society both should have a politicalawareness component.

2. At that time several politicians and congressmen were in the news having been caught receiv-ing money illegally to transfer their votes from the political party they belonged to and hadbeen elected to, to another political group. Corruption was then more evident than ever sinceit showed up in the mass media.

3. See Dibós et al. (2004) for more information about the components of the evaluation.

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