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Across the world, schools play a major role in shaping the attitudes, opinions and (perhaps most importantly) the behaviour of young people. Today’s generation of school children have been born into a world where AIDS is a harsh, unavoidable reality - a situation that their time at school can help them to prepare for. As well as providing an environment in which people can be educated about AIDS, schools often act as a centre-point for community discussion and activity; as such, they can be a vital tool in monitoring the epidemic and co-ordinating a response to it. With a capacity to reach large numbers of young people with information that can save their lives, basic school education can have such a powerful preventive effect that it has been described as a ‘social vaccine’.1 At the same time, efforts to educate young people in developing countries are being hampered by the epidemic itself. Pupils and teachers are falling ill, taking time off to care for family members and, in many cases, dying as a result of AIDS. This page explores these problems and the other effects that AIDS is having on schools, as well as the ways in which schools can be used to reduce the impact of the epidemic.
