The few Solomon Islanders who progressed through formal education before independence in 1978 felt that their schooling had distanced them from their Indigenous ways of knowing (Watson-Gegeo and Gegeo 1992; McDougall and Zobule, this issue). In fact, this critique of formal education was the starting point for the second major review of education in Solomon Islands, the Education for What? report released by the Educational Policy Review Committee in 1973. The committee that produced the report consulted widely, collecting more than two thousand recommendations from Solomon Islanders (Bugotu 1986, 41). The chair of the committee, Francis Bugotu, captured the rationale of the report in a 1986 article: "The consequences of unquestioned acceptance and adoption of foreign education systems have taken their toll, and serious problems have surfaced in undesirable forms, creating disruptions of island and community society norms and separation and neglect of traditional family ties. The survival of the genuine island way of life, coined recently as the 'Pacific Way,' is being harassed and threatened by new modes of behavior foreign to the islands" (1986,(42)(43). Elsewhere, he turned colonial racist tropes on their head, using the evocative phrase "the new darkness" to describe the awful future awaiting a Solomon Islands that embraced "the dazzling lights of civilization" offered through colonial education but neglected its own "traditional way of life" (Bugotu 1973, 78).Bugotu took inspiration from critical pedagogue Paulo Freire, who likened the way students are considered empty vessels waiting to be filled with the knowledge the teacher imparts to them to a "banking model" of education. Such a model resonated with the way classroom knowledge had developed in Solomon Islands' education system (Freire 2017, 44-45).

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As the linkages between education and transitional justice have become more explicit in the last decade (Cole 2007; Ramírez-Barat and Duthie 2015), attention has centred overwhelmingly on the role of the state in those linkages. Cole and Murphy (2009, 3) have framed education as a justice institution where 'students first come into contact with official structures of their society'. Paulson (2009, 10) has argued that post-conflict investment in education could signal to citizens their government's commitment to peace. And Cole (2007, 123) argues that for transitional justice, education can 'potentially function as a secondary phase (after trials and truth commissions) that reflects the state's commitment to institutionalising transitional justice'. Even at the school level, King (2014), McCully (2012) and Quaynor (2012) have argued that pedagogical reform to promote critical thinking and open dialogue among students models democratic politics far better than the rote memorisation of curricular content.

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