Education, Citizenship and Violence in Peru: A Reading of the CVR Report

From the rubble of a collapsed educational system, the PCP-Sendero Luminoso emerged. Its main leaders were teachers or university-trained professionals. Universities, Higher Pedagogical Institutes, and secondary schools were its main recruitment base. The CVR revealed the importance of the educational sphere in the emergence and development of violence and the lasting effects of the internal armed conflict. Given the importance of the problem, the CVR highlighted the reform of Education as one of four indispensable institutional reforms to prevent the history of violence from repeating itself. Twenty-five years have passed, and public education remains neglected. Several educational reform proposals exist, but none of them explicitly incorporates the fact that we are a post-conflict society, nor that the educational sphere played a central role in triggering and sustaining the internal armed conflict.