The School in Times of War: A Look at Education from Crisis and Violence

The study is framed around three central questions. First, what place do the school and the educational system in general occupy in the strategies of the subversive groups and the Armed Forces? Second, what social and cultural conditions make our educational system fertile ground for the germination and maturation of violent projects such as that of Sendero Luminoso? Third, what components of the educational system can be used in a strategy to fight against the forces of war and in a project to promote life and peace in Peru? Although these three questions are present throughout the entire work, the first is more thoroughly examined in chapter 2, the second in chapters 1 and 3, and the last in chapter 4. Our subject of study was, from the outset, the relationship between political violence and education, but as we received and analyzed the testimonies, we focused increasingly and more specifically on Sendero Luminoso. What we decided about it in this work does not stem from an initial interest in studying it as such; rather, it is from the concern about education and the urgency of understanding what was happening in the schools of some areas with a Senderista presence that the need to incorporate it as a central element of the analysis imposed itself on us. (Excerpt from presentation).