Education for Iraqi children still suffers

By UDAY KAREEM al-MAYAHI

BAGHDAD — As Iraq continues to grapple with intermittent violence, a collapsed infrastructure and political rivalries, many worry the country’s leaders are ignoring a key component of the country’s future: the education of its children.

Education officials, political leaders and teachers point to conditions in Sadr City, the Shia slum in the capital, where schools are teeming with students who are crammed into classrooms so overcrowded children are forced to sit on the floor and attend school in shifts.

With its 1.3 million residents, Sadr City is the most impoverished district in this capital of 7 million. Many residents live in squalor, with only a few hours of electricity and water a day.

For many children in the district, conditions at school are not much better than those at home. Educators say schools simply lack the resources to deal with the overwhelming number of students, “The situation is unbearable,” said Raad al-Musawi, the principal of al-Basheer elementary school.

Schools throughout Iraq face many of the same problems — large class sizes, aging facilities, overcrowding.

But observers are especially concerned about the status of education in Sadr City because of the unusually high level of poverty and illiteracy in the district.

Educators say students there often show up to class hungry and struggle to finish the school day.

Sitting on the floor

Yasin Waheeb, an education planning director in Baghdad, said classes should have a maximum of 25 students, but many in Sadr City accommodate 40 to 50. Students frequently sit on the floor because of the lack of desks.

Students now attend schools in shifts, with the average school day lasting only three hours. Class time has been shortened from 45 to 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, the conditions of most of the decades-old buildings continue to deteriorate.

And while the average student population for a school in Baghdad is 550, schools in Sadr City are overwhelmed with more than 2,000 students.

Ammar Zamil, who heads the ministry of education’s facilities department, blamed Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime for neglecting schools in Sadr City.

“The deterioration of these buildings started when the former regime neglected to repair them,” he said.

The buildings today “are not fit for the increase in the number of (students),” he said, “(they) require large and modern buildings — not ones that date back to the 1950s.”

Sadr City Mayor Hasan Karim Mattar said local authorities are concerned education is not considered a priority.

“School buildings are the most important issue, but this won’t be resolved in the near future,” he said. “The government needs to make an effort. The ministry (of education) should recognize some of these issues and provide solutions.”

X Uday Kareem al-Mayahi is a reporter in Iraq who writes for IWPR, a nonprofit organization in London that trains journalists in areas of conflict. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services