This paper is the first to provide causal evidence on the relationship between education and interethnic and interreligious tolerance. We use a unique large cross-sectional dataset with attitudinal data and show that an exogenous increase in education results in higher tolerance and pro-social attitudes towards individuals from a different religion and ethnicity.
We provide evidence that moral education in primary schools under Suharto explains some portion of the treatment effects: cohorts born before 1988 were exposed to an indoctrination program by the Indonesian government that emphasized the unity of Indonesia and tried to lower both religious and ethnic cleavages. In addition, we emphasize important labor market mechanisms through which INPRES may have affected tolerance: individuals more strongly exposed to the program are more likely to migrate into cities, to work in trade and industry.
These factors in turn imply that the religious and ethnic diversity of treated individuals is increased. Furtermore, treated individuals earn substantially higher incomes.
This paper has important policy implications: it provides clean evidence on the endogeneity of preferences [5, 46, 33] to schooling. It shows that education has additional positive benefits in terms of increased tolerance in addition to well-documented benefits, such as increased citizenship and lowered delinquencies [41, 40]. It shows that education at school can substantially affect attitudes towards people from a different ethnicity and religion. This in turn implies that moral education at schools may be a viable tool for governments to increase cohesion among citizens.
Future research should try to extend this work along two dimension: first, researchers should focus on understanding the exact mechanisms through which education affects attitudes.
Second, researchers should test for the external validity of these results in a developed country context: For example, researchers could exploit exogenous variation in education in a developed country context (through compulsory schooling laws) to test for changes in tolerance and racism.
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