Building National Unity through Education: The Impact of Civic Education on Liberian Primary School Students’ National Identification and Intergroup Attitudes

• In Event: Tricky Pathways: The Intricacies of Education’s Relationships to Conflict, Violence, and Peace

Proposal

Little causal evidence exists examining the effectiveness of civic education programs. The research that does exist mostly emanates from Western contexts and focuses on the impact of civic education on democratic values, skills, attitudes, and behaviors. This research has paid little focus to civic education’s impact on identity formation and intergroup attitudes, despite the fact that in post-conflict societies, civic education is often also expected to foster peace, stability, and social cohesion by building a collective civic identity (Levine & Bishai, 2010; Quaynor, 2012). I will be working with a team of researchers to evaluate the introduction of a new civic education curriculum in Liberian primary schools through a randomized experiment. This provides a rare opportunity to provide causal evidence as to civic education’s ability to impact student political attitudes relevant for intergroup conflict.

These attitudes may also vary according to the student’s mother tongue and language of instruction at school [1]. Learning in your mother-tongue is believed to not only help preserve an ethnic group’s culture (Kymlicka, 1995) but to promote the psychosocial well-being of students (Wright & Bougie, 2007) and improve students’ academic results and duration of study (Seidel and Moritz, 2009). While providing instruction in a local language may remove a barrier to education (Benson et al., 2010; Zhao & Huo, 2019) a common language has also been theorized (e.g., Weber, 1976) and found empirically (e.g., Miguel, 2004) to foster a cohesive national identity. Instruction in a local language may actually increase feelings of ethnic nationalism (Clots-Figueras & Masella, 2013).

In this paper, I ask:

RQ1: Does civic education influence students’ strength of national identification and intergroup attitudes?

RQ2: Does the student’s mother tongue and language of instruction at school moderate civic education’s impact on students’ strength of national identification and intergroup attitudes?

We will evaluate the new civic education program through a randomized controlled trial beginning in Fall 2023. The baseline will take place in September 2023. The endline is planned for June-July 2024. The evaluation design follows a school-based randomization, where 70 treatment schools in 3 counties in Liberia will receive the new program in the 2023-2024 school year while 70 control schools will not receive the program. We will survey students at baseline and endline. The survey will measure student outcomes related to sense of national identity, positive attitudes toward Liberia, and tolerance. The survey will also collect information on students’ mother tongue and language of instruction at school.

To understand the program’s impacts on student outcomes, we will compare the progress on these outcomes of the control group (which will not receive the intervention) and the treatment group (which will receive it) between baseline and endline and identify whether the program impacted students differentially according to their mother tongue and language of instruction at school.


[1] Informally, Liberian schools have recently started teaching in local languages in primary school.

Authors

• Sorana Acris, New York University

• Alejandro Jorge Ganimian

• Elisabeth King, New York University