Teaching Socio-Emotional Skills in Divided Societies: The Impact of History and Peace Education

Can teaching children about past violent conflicts help them learn skills such as cross-cultural tolerance, empathy, non-violence, and national citizenship? Countries with violent pasts often omit this history from school curricula, creating significant knowledge gaps among youth. At the same time, youth in post-conflict settings may struggle with low trust, poor cross-cultural cooperation, and a sense of exclusion rather than national citizenship. To address these issues, a UNESCO initiative is advocating for countries to introduce history, peace, and genocide education. These curricula aim to make schoolchildren aware of past mistakes and capable of rejecting division and exclusion. Whether it succeeds has yet to be empirically studied. Working with 910 secondary students, researchers will run a pilot experiment testing and refining curricula currently being developed in Nigeria in partnership with UNESCO. Nigerian policymakers will use these results to inform broader curriculum rollouts, which they then aim to test as a full RCT.