Drawing on concepts of ethnicity and ethnic nationalism, this paper seeks to analyze the reasons and extent to which school education has been utilized to define the newborn nation. This will be done through an analysis of Myanmar’s political history and, subsequently, through an examination of specific educational policies and practices such as the introduction of a one-language policy, standardized curriculum and textbooks and teacher-centered pedagogies that have deliberately been used in the attempt to assimilate rather than integrate Myanmar’s ethnic diversity. The second part of the paper will address the nature and dynamics of decades of identity-based conflicts arguing that the “ethnicization”of the education system in favour of the Bamar majority has not only acted as a catalyst for the perpetuation of violence exacerbating divisions along civil-military lines but has reinforced ethno-linguistic identities through the use of education as a tool of resistance, with critical implications for social cohesion, tolerance for diversity and the overall future of the country.
Eighteen years after the end of 2001 conflict between ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians, North Macedonia remains a country deeply polarized along ethno-national lines with implications for the maintenance of peace. The peace-building policies introduced by the Ohrid Framework Agreement (OFA) based on a consociational model of power-sharing have accommodated the demands of ethnic Albanians, including the right of access to higher education (HE) in the mother-tongue which represented one of the root-causes in the escalation of the 2001 conflict. The OFA’s exclusive focus on access and availability through state funding for higher education in the Albanian language has however favored a process of ethnicization of the tertiary sector. This paper seeks to investigate the unintended consequences of the OFA-induced ethnic self-ghettoisation within the public higher education system and, by the same token, it critiques the OFA’s lack of mechanisms to reach across the ethnic divide through the lenses of a rights-based approach to education. It ultimately argues that without a strong governmental commitment to deethnicize education by transcending the OFA’s intrinsic limits, power-sharing remains permeable to political manipulation which critically hampers social transformation and increases the probability of inter-ethnic tension, further weakening the peace process.
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