Possibly the world’s grimmest secondary school lies in a leafy suburb of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Tuol Sleng is an average three-storey building following the model of many secondaries in Asia: a block with a staircase at each end and covered balconies pupils walk along to get from one classroom to the next.
In front of the L-shaped block is a grassy area that would once have been filled with the voices of pupils taking their morning and afternoon breaks. But that was before the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975.
An unnerving peacefulness hangs over what was Tuol Svay Prey High School, or S-21 as it was called by the Khmer Rouge, for whom it was the main torture centre for the city’s people. Estimates vary on how many Cambodians were killed by Pol Pot’s regime, but 1.8 million - almost a third of the country’s population at that time - seems conservative. Of those, 17,000 passed through Tuol Sleng on their way to the killing fields of Choeung Ek just outside the city.
When the Vietnamese liberated Phnom Penh in 1975, just seven people of those 17,000 were alive. They found 14 decaying corpses lying on floors and iron bedsteads on which they had been tortured. The Vietnamese buried them in the courtyard but left other things as they were. These rooms, with the grainy blow-ups of the corpses on the walls, are the first you encounter.
In the next building, things are worse. The Khmer Rouge documented its deeds extensively and with care. Tuol Sleng had its own photographer, whose job it was to take mugshots of all the prisoners.
These stark black-and-white pictures fill the next two classrooms in the adjacent block. There are hundreds attached to rows of display boards. Many are of children who should have filled these classrooms with laughter. My eye was caught by one small boy of eight or nine, whose image would later haunt me as I visited the UN monument at Choeung Ek and looked at the heap of skulls carefully labelled by age. Perhaps his was one of them.
Tuol Sleng makes any educator wonder what we are doing to prepare students for a world in which the deeds of evil men and women thrive. Tuol Sleng’s silence was deep and heavy with reproach. The teaching of history has no finer advocate.
