Throughout history, governments of all political stripes have used history and literature curricula to reinforce national ideologies and identities. The promulgation of official memory through the school system can be an effective form of propaganda. The educational setting can become a conduit for the government or leaders' views, presenting political ideas and beliefs as either “correct” or “incorrect.” Textbooks and curricula can be used to justify or deny past state crimes, create revisionist history, present on-going injustices as natural, or perpetuate attitudes that replicate the conditions under which injustices are committed. Where school systems remain segregated and unequal, education can be manipulated to perpetuate inequalities that are a legacy of past conflicts, dispossession, or repression.

If public education can function to inflame hatreds, mobilize for war, and teach acceptance of injustice, it can be used also as a powerful tool for the cultivation of peace, democratic change, and respect for others. This premise has been a prominent focus of the United Nations (UN) Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), as well as numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs) throughout the Balkans and in conflict zones around the world. If children living in divided societies can come together in the schools, this contact can be used to help them question the prejudices and stereotypes in their surrounding environment.

Shortly after the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took power in July, 1994, the Rwandan Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) placed a moratorium on teaching Rwandan history in the country's schools until consensus could be reached on how history should be taught. Almost a decade later, this emergency measure remains in effect. There is much disagreement among government officials, intellectuals, and Rwandan citizens about the significance of the events leading up to and occurring during the war and genocide. So there is little agreement about what historical account to teach. In making their case, government officials pointed to the fact that hundreds of highly educated Rwandans, including doctors, lawyers, teachers, and clergy had directly or indirectly participated in the genocide. According to the government, these professionals had been educated in post-independence schools that had taught a virulent form of ethnic hatred toward Tutsi. “The propagandists,” as Alison Des Forges wrote in her book on the genocide, “built upon the lessons Rwandans had learned in school.”

The difficulty and importance of making decisions about teaching history cannot be overemphasized. Further, the ways in which memory, history, myths, and symbols are used can lead people to develop identities that either promote intergroup conflict or help to draw diverse groups together.

In his recent exhibit, “Migrations,” photographer Sebastiao Salgado (2000) looks through his camera's eye to tell what he calls “a story of our times,” a story of massive and global movements of people. Most often these people are migrating because they seek refuge from rural poverty, or because they are refugees or displaced persons whose movements are caused by war or other political, ethnic, or religious conflict. Salgado presents haunting images of outstretched hands reaching for a new life that is just out of grasp, hungry children in parched landscapes that yield no food, masses on the move with nowhere to go. These images come from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. These are not the typical media images of globalization, which associate modernity with progress and prosperity, new technologies, and high-speed travel. We acknowledge the typical modern images, but we also think it critical not to forget Salgado's more disturbing images, which are also images of our times.

Salgado could just as easily have fixed his lens on disturbing scenes in the United States: the hungry and homeless who migrate from shelter to street in search of spare change or a bite to eat, undernourished school children moving from home to school on unsafe streets, gangs of teenagers crossing neighborhood boundaries to mark territory and engage in seemingly senseless battles. In everyday life, these scenes occur in the context of great wealth and plenty that often exists right around the corner.