What Rests Behind Events: A critical analysis of “Attacks on Education”

• In Event: Reframing Threat: A comparative analysis of attacks on education

Proposal

Throughout the week, Sofia, a sixth grader, visited her plantain tree, watered it, and fertilized it. She was not worried that it would die during break. School families living closest to the school farm would take care of it. In 2017, in what had been a pasture bordered by native bush and royal palms, plantain plants like Sofia's were growing to shade some 2,000 cacao seedlings scattered over two hectares of land. The crop, located in Colombia's Araucanian savannah, was the educational project of the Rafael Baralt school. Its purpose: to make the village of La Serenidad smell of cacao. By committing to cacao, La Serenidad clung to life. Growing cacao on school grounds was the community's response to the army’s earlier takeover of the farm.

Two years earlier, the national army had arrived in La Serenidad to attack the National Liberation Army's Eastern War Front and the Eastern Bloc of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army. The military camp took over the fields where, until that day, the students had planted cilantro, lemons, and other vegetables. In an area of guerrilla influence, the army's presence signaled the latent threat of a confrontation. The school was caught in a crossfire between the guerrillas and the army. One day, as Principal Olivares was dismissing students returning to their farms, she heard a burst of bullets tearing the sky. No member of the educational community was injured. The confrontations shut down the school for almost six weeks, only stopping when the Parents Association convinced the guerrillas to give in. The guerrilla, not the national army, withdrew from the battlefield.

Months later, teachers and students returned. If, at some point, the army had justified setting up a camp on the school farm by describing it as a "stubble farm," from that moment on, the school would run a cross-cutting curriculum oriented towards cacao production. Thus, there would be no doubt that the school and the village distanced themselves from the war by smelling of cocoa.

Through this case study, I challenge current understandings of attacks on education. Presently, this notion prioritizes the exceptional facet of violence over its most quotidian and resilient dimensions. I rely on Wagner Pacifici's (2017) sociological analysis of events to examine the processes through which the takeover of the school farm took place and its short and long-term repercussions for the school. I also contrast the narratives that educators, parents, the governor's office, the guerrillas, and the army produced of the event and how these interpretations traveled across locations and times to serve different purposes. To situate the school in its socio-political context, I rely on over 110 interviews and archival work conducted in Colombia between 2017 and 2018. The dataset includes voices of state and non-state armed actors. Without denying how the notion of attacks on education has made war’s impact on schools legible to practitioners and policymakers, this presentation seeks to offer analytical elements to radicalize our struggle against military presence in educational settings.

Author

• Diana Rodríguez-Gómez, University of Wisconsin-Madison