Peace Education in Rwandan Secondary Schools: Coping With Contradictory Messages

This study explores how peace education in Rwandan secondary schools has faced challenges linked with the content of the programme, its implementers, and the environment in which it has to evolve. The research focuses on how students take different sources of information and how they respond to messages contradictory to the curriculum peace content taught at school. The research shows how messages contradictory to the curriculum peace content were moulded in families and/or amongst peers outside the school. The students and teachers demonstrated three possible responses: they accepted the contradictory messages, rejected them, or, in a large number of the cases, articulated an inability to make a clear-cut decision between the curriculum content and the other content contradictory to it. This difficulty to handle these contradictory messages may constitute a risk to the achievement of the expected outcomes of the programme.