Education is a war casualty in Baghdad

By SUSANNE FISCHER

INSTITUTE FOR WAR & PEACE REPORTING

BAGHDAD — While students across America return to their classrooms, the education system in Iraq is nearing total collapse, according to teachers, parents and government officials.

“Education in Baghdad’s schools is a joke,” said Ali Abdul-Hussein, 35, who pulled his two children out of school due to fears for their security. “The ministry of education can’t provide education or protection for our children.”

The challenges facing the capital’s school system seem almost overwhelming.

Parents, fearful that their children will be kidnapped or attacked on their way to class, often accompany them to school. Some wait there all day so they can bring their children home safely.

Parents often beg administrators to allow their children to transfer to schools in districts they perceive as more peaceful.

Meanwhile, educators complain it’s almost impossible to teach in such a violent environment. Bombings and neighborhood violence lead many students to miss classes. Those who do attend, traumatized by the more than four years of war, sometime exhibit behavioral problems in the classroom.

With approximately 600 teachers killed across the country during the past academic year, many educators simply refuse to go to work.

In some neighborhoods, the violence has forced some schools to shut down for months at a time.

“Terrorists, extremist Islamists and supporters of the former regime are targeting educational institutions in Baghdad and Iraq,” said Falah al-Qureishi, an education ministry spokesman. “They are trying to disrupt education and instill fear in students and teachers so that they will no longer go to school.”

Despite assigning interior ministry security staff to protect some schools, many say that the past academic year was a failure in Baghdad.

Some worry that an entire generation of Iraqis may be lost because of the meltdown in the education system.

There are more than 21,000 schools in Baghdad. UNICEF Special Representative for Iraq Roger Wright noted that Iraq once boasted one of the best educational systems in the Middle East.

Crumbling schools

Today, however, many schools are in disrepair, lacking water, power and sanitation facilities.

UNICEF made the reconstruction of Iraq’s crumbling schools one of its top priorities following the overthrow of former president Saddam Hussein. But instead, the agency has been forced to devote its resources to aiding the tens of thousands of refugees who have been displaced by the sectarian violence.

With so much violence going on around them, educators say the idea of maintaining discipline in schools has all but vanished.

Shamil Abdullah, headmaster of al-Quds Secondary School, likens his facility to a ticking bomb ready to explode at any moment. The teaching staff, he said, has become almost as unruly as the students.

“There are two rooms in my school for the teachers, one for Sunni and the other for Shia,” he said. “They seldom meet without squabbling over the political situation in Iraq, so I decided to separate them to ease the tension.”

Abdullah said the school has been forced to shut down several times after receiving threats that it was about to be attacked. He was unsure, however, whether the threats actually came from insurgents or the students themselves.

Meanwhile, students feel they can run roughshod over the staff. Jasim Saeed, a 19-year-old senior at the school, said he and his classmates have no qualms about thumbing their noses at school staff, sometimes using empty classrooms to view pornographic videos or smoke.

Teachers said they’re reluctant to punish students out of fear of retribution from the pupils’ families.

Rather than risk sending their children to schools, some families have resorted to home schooling or hiring private tutors.

Hind Abdulla, a 45-year-old Sunni, hired a private tutor last year so that her daughter could complete her final year of high school and apply for admission to a university.

“The problem I had was finding a teacher from our own religious sect,” she said. “Shia teachers refuse to teach Sunni students, and vice versa.”

X Susanne Fischer is the country director in Iraq for The Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a non-profit organization in London that trains journalists in areas of conflict. Material for this report was provided by IWPR correspondents in Baghdad, whose names are being withheld out of concern for their security. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services..