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| Iraq |
| An Iraqi Education: a firsthand report on postwar school reconstruction |
| 2004-01-15 |
| by Bill Evers, Wall Street Journal EFL . . . You’re a senior adviser on education for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), recruited by the White House and the office of the secretary of defense and approved by Ambassador Paul Bremer. Your five-month mission is to help revive teaching and learning in a country on the mend from a fascist despotism. What’s it like? • It’s gratifying. The Iraqi children and grown-ups smile, always say "Welcome" and wave. The teachers and administrators are friendly and dedicated to academic success. . . . Iraqi parents love standardized testing and were fervently concerned not to let either the war in March and April, or the subsequent guerrilla skirmishes, interfere with the nationwide testing program. . . . • It’s not Afghanistan. I saw girls in school all over Iraq. In primary school, 45% of students are girls; in secondary school, 40%. . . . Iraq has a tradition of valuing education and a reputation for having produced, in the pre-Saddam era, some of the best architects, doctors and engineers in the Arab Middle East. • It’s not as scary as it looks on TV. But you do have to exercise reasonable prudence. I traveled in Baghdad and around the country more than most civilians who worked in the Baghdad palace. Usually I traveled with guards armed with assault rifles. I personally found it a bit nerve-racking whenever I was stuck in a traffic jam. But in five months I never saw a firefight, a bleeding wound or a dead body. I felt and heard explosions, but none were closer than several football fields away. Watching TV coverage of Iraq is much scarier than being there. In a sense, much of my and my colleagues’ efforts were to help a multitude of coalition civilian agencies, military units and international agencies talk to each other and coordinate work in the field of education. We didn’t, for example, want Japan and the U.S. Agency for International Development both trying to repair the same school. We also tried to create conditions for normal schoolwork by children and teachers. When American or international agencies wanted to impose While there, I and my colleagues in education met with school officials from the provinces, who since the war had been largely cut off from Baghdad (in a country that has lately had no postal system, no telephone system and little Internet access). We helped re-establish communication with Kurdish officials who had functioned independently of Baghdad for 12 years. The coalition military working with civilian advisers made sure that hundreds of thousands of teachers scattered around the country were paid regularly, in the absence of a working banking system. . . . Religion is taught in Iraqi schools as a subject now and was taught under Saddam. If you are a Muslim, you take classes in Islam. If you are a Christian, you are excused from taking Islamic classes. If there are enough Christians in a school, a Christian teacher teaches them classes in Christianity. The Saddam textbooks on Islam are not al Qaeda reprints. But they do present a Sunni interpretation on such matters as ritual ablutions and the early Caliphate. Shiite students were forced under Saddam to learn the Sunni interpretation, which was the only interpretation of Islam allowed in the schools. With the exception of a school for the diplomatic community, there were no private primary and secondary schools. Independent schools were nationalized in the 1970s. Currently, the Ministry of Education has a task force drafting a measure that would once again legalize private schools. . . . The White House had specifically told my colleagues and me to concentrate on getting the children, teachers and textbooks back in the classrooms. We were wisely admonished by White House officials to offer our best advice when asked by Iraqis, but to avoid directly imposing extensive reforms on the Iraqi schools. We followed this suggested course. Thus, we helped remove totalitarian teachings from the classrooms, helped the schools and ministry resume operations, and kept our advisory office small. Now Iraqis themselves are restructuring the ministry organization, considering decentralization plans, and holding forums on curriculum reform and the future of Iraq’s school system. . . . As the Coalition Provisional Authority turns over civilian and military responsibilities to the Iraqis between now and the end of June, I hope the process goes as well in other fields as it has in education. Mr. Evers, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, served, from July 20 through Dec. 17, 2003, as a senior adviser for education to Ambassador Paul Bremer. |
| Posted by:Mike |