Rethinking the theoretical grounding of integrated education in conflicted societies1

INTRODUCTION Historically, segregated schools are the norm. An alternative educational model is provided through integrated schools-schools where children who are more normally educated apart are deliberately educated together. Integrated schools have originated in Northern Ireland but similar efforts are now met in several countries (e.g. Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Croatia, Israel) (see McGlynn, Zembylas & Bekerman, 2013). Integrated schools are believed to be essential in contributing to the healing of the wounds that afflict conflicted societies, easing the path towards peace, reconciliation, and integration (Bekerman, 2004, 2005; Ben-Nun, 2013; McGlynn, 2007; McGlynn, Niens & Hewstone, 2004). In writing about integrated education though-its scope, its challenges, the social and political forces that drive or oppose it-the temptation is to suggest that integrated schools constitute “a magic panacea” (McGlynn, 2007, p. 271) in the route to challenge conflictive perspectives. Our studies during the last decade in the conflicted societies we come from, Cyprus and Israel (Bekerman & Zembylas, 2012)-countries in which conflicts are still better understood as based on ethnic/national and not religious terms-as well as other researchers’ work in countries in which conflict might be characterized as a religious divide (e.g. see Davies, 2004; Gallagher, 2004; Hughes & Donnelly, 2012) indicate that the solutions offered in schools (including integrated schools) are often part of a larger rhetoric which seems to be much more an answer to political needs rather than to the complex educational realities of conflict and division. Thus, the theoretical assumptions that are made are often grounded in essentialised (e.g. ethnic or religious) differentiations between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘us’ and ‘them’. We wonder whether what is really needed in integrated education is a different theoretical language of the notion of ‘integration’ itself, one that somehow overcomes the dominant language about ‘social cohesion’ or the ‘integration’ of differences among identities that are perceived to be homogeneous and collective.