Iraqi School Kids: "They don’t see why they should prepare themselves.”
Page 2 of 2
|
|
Nakash also says that inflation has finally caught up with teachers' salaries, which had been raised from $5 a month under Saddam Hussein to $100 a month after the invasion—a middle-of-the-pack salary these days. (With jobs scarce in country, there is no shortage of Iraqis applying for teacher positions.) Nakash, who has been teaching for more than 25 years, is one of the highest paid teachers, making 500,000 Iraqi dinar—about $330—a month. Nevertheless, even he can barely afford to keep up with rising prices.
"I pay 100,000 [dinars] each month for electricity from the generator in my neighborhood," he says, before reeling off the current cost of gas, then meat and other foodstuffs. Some of those prices are 40 times what they were a year ago.
Nakash also says that education at his school is also suffering as instructors try to accommodate those students who miss school because of roadblocks and other daily traffic hassles or because they have lost a family member or friend, as, it seems, nearly everyone in Baghdad has nowadays.
"Because of the security situation, we try to facilitate things for the students. But if we were working on our regular system, at least 50 percent of the students probably would not have passed," Nakash says.
The sectarian tensions that are in danger of tearing Iraq apart are also being felt in Baghdad's schools, sometimes in ways that would be recognizable in just about any high school. One student relates this story:
"There was a Sunni girl and a Shiite girl. They were friends for a long time, and at one point the Shiite girl saw the Sunni girl talking to another girl, and the Shiite girl told her not to speak to the third girl anymore because she's Sunni. The girl said to her 'I'm Sunni,' and the girl said, 'Well, I guess I shouldn't be speaking to you either.'"
Her brother relates a far graver story from his own high school.
"The headmaster was giving one of the students a hard time because he's from Fallujah and the headmaster was Shiite. So the student brought a gun to school and shot at the headmaster," he says. "The headmaster went into hiding for weeks."
Other news reports have described instances in which Shiite teachers have discrimated against Sunni students—and vice versa, although this doesn't appear to be very common. Teachers at half a dozen schools I visited frequently said that they were speaking with students about sectarianism and hoping to diffuse tensions among the youngest generation of Iraqis before they got out of control.
"Increasing our students' knowledge is the best way to fight sectarianism," says Fatima Ibrahim Ahmed, the head of the Al-Mansour Teacher's Institute.
But even the best efforts by teachers cannot change realities on the ground. Schools are becoming increasingly segregated by sect. Sunni families living in areas where there are Shiite majorities have been moving to Sunni neighborhoods and enrolling their students there. Shiites have been moving away from mixed Baghdad suburbs in the north and west of the city and into more homogenous areas. As a result, Tareq bin Zaid High School has seen enrollment rise from 320 last year to 620 this year as parents insist on sending their children to a school nearby rather than bus them across the city to an unfriendly neighborhood.
But Jabbar says the biggest problem is that so many students have been affected by Baghdad's rampant kidnappings, assassinations, and random deaths.
"What I'm seeing now is that many students are being very careless about what they want to study," Jabbar says. "They don't see why they should prepare themselves. The future is very ambiguous."
Farhan, the principal at Dijla Elementary, puts it more bluntly.
"It's getting worse," she says of the violence.
Not all students agree with this assessment, though, and some remain remarkably optimistic. "My parents gave me the choice to quit school because of the situation. I insisted to continue because I am a good student," says 11-year-old Amin Khaldoun, who was in the classroom at Dijla elementary when the mortar hit. "We want to live in peace like American students, and to have the rights of our childhood."
David Enders is author of Baghdad Bulletin: Dispatches on the American Occupation.
