Social Science Bites

Consider some of the conflicts bubbling or boiling in the world today, and then plot where education – both schooling and less formal means of learning – fits in. Is it a victim, suffering from the conflict or perhaps a target of violence or repression? Maybe you see it as complicit in the violence, a perpetrator, so to speak. Or perhaps you see it as a liberator, offering a way out a system that is unjust in your opinion. Or just maybe, its role is as a peacebuilder. Those scenarios are the framework in which Tejendra Pherali, a professor of education, conflict and peace at University College London, researches the intersection of education and conflict. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Pherali discusses the various roles education takes in a world of violence. “We tend to think about education as teaching and learning in mathematics and so forth,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds. “But numeracy and literacy are always about something, so when we talk about the content, then we begin to talk abou