Yet violence both actual and potential is present everywhere, every day. It happens in a hundred different ways, some blatant and overt, some subtle and sly. Violence at School: Global Issues and Interventions, a study conducted by Unesco's International Bureau of Education in different countries (Jordan, Ethiopia, Malaysia, Israel, Solvakia and certain countries of Latin America) on four continents, countries with different cultural, religious and racial mixes, confirms the reality of thisphenomenon. It assesses the impact of violence on people and nations and ``invites readers to debate together'' to see how ``education can cope with, prevent, reduce or divert (its) negative effects... on learning, instruction and social lives of young people.''

Little research has been done so far on violence in schools. Little wonder then that the subject is absent from any official agenda or debate on education. Little wonder too that the data so cogently presented in this slim volume is disturbing enough to ring alarm bells and raise a clamour for some serious measures.

The study's major finding is quite simply that school violence is on the rise irrespective of the country's culture and religion. But its high occurrence in developing countries is something to be worried about because this adds to ``the existing problems of national development''. To be sure, the economic loss caused by violence anywhere is enormous, but in developing countries, it further compounds the problems of education andhuman resources.

It is easy enough to know who engineers school violence: regular students for one, dropouts for another or street children and gangs of jobless youth. But try and understand why this happens and you slip into a bottomless web. Causes of violence can be manifold: economic (social exclusion, poverty, inequitable educational job opportunities, insufficient education expenditure, shortage of counsellors and even under-equipped and over-crowded classrooms and inadequate transport); familial (too little supervision, too much punishment, lack of values or moral guidelines); school factors (poor performance, `bad' models and peer relations, teachers' attitudes and types of punishment, public humiliation of dropouts and failures and even irrelevant curricula); and societal and political factors (political violence, war, street gangs, alcohol etc.). They can be all of these or none of these.

A word of caution is voiced by the study. There is no one-dimensional and unilateral link betweenconditions that can incite violence in school and acts of violence themselves. This link is by no means simply linear. If anything, violence is born of an amalgam of factors both inherent and external to an individual.

What do schools do counter this growing tendency? Many schools have established anti-violence policies, for example, more counsellors and counselling services, reinforcement of regulations and discipline and projects such as education and tolerance; others are tackling the problem through the curriculum and through school community co-operation. The quality of teacher-parent understanding is crucial to building a nourishing environment. So is a flexible curriculum and teachers' -- and parents' -- ability to listen to children. Neglect whatever the reason proves costly for both perpetrator and victim. It damages a personality and the learning of pro-social behaviour. Worse, it contains the risk of turning a violent child into a juvenile delinquent or an adult criminal as he/she carriesthe aggressiveness of his school life into the wider world. Violence need not be a world through which adolescents have to pass in their journey through life.