Education authorities in the North are not doing enough to promote lasting peace or tackle controversial issues, according to papers presented to the British Educational Research Association conference at the weekend.
Dr Tony Gallagher from Queen's University Belfast claimed there was a "debilitating culture of silence" and challenged teachers to do more to help the peace process and to create a more plural society.
He said that against the background of the violence surrounding Drumcree, the murder of the Quinn boys in Ballymoney and the Omagh bomb, "one might ask whether all the work to promote tolerance and reconciliation has been a waste of time".
Another paper at the conference, held for the first time in Northern Ireland, suggested that even schools promoting education for mutual understanding often had superficial or cosmetic cross-community contacts.
Ms Ruth Leitch and Ms Rosemary Kilpatrick, also from Queen's, said schools should draw on children's insights in developing curricular and pastoral responses to the continuing political unrest. Both papers support a 1996 study showing that the new themes of Education for Mutual Understanding and Cultural Heritage were having little impact and that few schools had moved beyond "polite exchange" between Catholic and Protestant pupils.
Dr Gallagher said primary schools should work together to form integrated nursery schools to avoid the creation of separate nursery sectors. Local schools should share experience and practice and education authorities should consider founding integrated sixth forms in suitable areas.
The achievements of education in building a better society had been limited. "Most of our local politicians showed imagination and courage in signing up to the Good Friday Agreement and the overwhelming majority of people showed their commitment to peace when they endorsed the agreement at the referendum.
"Now is the time for the education authorities to show the same level of imagination and courage," Dr Gallagher told the conference.
Ms Leitch and Ms Kilpatrick looked at eight schools that had an impressive range of activities related to education for mutual understanding. But even then, some pupils viewed them as "fairly superficial" and felt they did not have lasting effects.
"When asked about the way forward, pupils, although they had a number of misgivings, stated a preference for the challenge of encounter with real opportunities to air and hear genuine points of view.
"Some pupils had indeed attended conferences and residential experiences in which this had been allowed to happen in a fairly safe environment and had led to positive outcomes," the academics said.
Yet, the overall consensus of pupils in the study was that the exploration of their views in school was rarely encouraged. Ms Leitch and Ms Kilpatrick suggest more support and training for teachers to enable them to address more effectively controversial issues linked with the political conflict.
Ms Rosalind Pritchard from the University of Ulster said that after partition Northern unionists were understandably inclined to repudiate cultural factors which had contributed to Irish nationalism, foremost among them the Irish language.
"This had the effect of cutting them off from their cultural roots and leaving them no alternative but `definition by opposition': that is a construction of identity in terms of what they were not and a failure to address in sufficient depth and breadth what they were."
She urged unionists to engage with the Irish language as a way to contribute to cultural continuity, to depoliticise it and prevent political opponents from hi-jacking it for their own purposes.