Iraqi School Kids: "They don’t see why they should prepare themselves.”
News: Students struggle to keep up amidst daily bombings and sectarian warfare.
April 12, 2006
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As students file back to class from recess at Dijla Elementary School, located in a district on Baghdad's west side, the school's principal leads me to a classroom with some words of caution. In October, one of the school's other rooms had been hit by a mortar round, killing one student and injuring ten.
"Try not to bring up the attack," she says. "We just kept the room closed. The students are afraid to go inside it again."
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, schools in Iraq have changed dramatically. On the bright side, the curriculums have been updated—textbooks have dropped their obsequious references to the former dictator, such as "Saddam Hussein invented electricity and brought it to Iraq"—and reconstruction has come along slowly, bringing basic amenities such as bathrooms, sewage, and new classrooms to schools.
But there is still much work to be done, and the ongoing violence in the country has severely hampered education. Hundreds of students have left Dijla in the last two years, often because their parents have decided to keep them at home, fearing for their safety. Teachers at various schools around Baghdad said that the Ministry of Education has allowed students to study at home and come to school only for exams.
Between October 27 and February 28, about 400 teachers and employees of the Ministry of Education have been killed and 170 have been wounded. According to Falah Al-Korashi, a senior official at the Ministry of Education, 417 schools have been assaulted in the governates of al-Anbar, Diyala, and west Baghdad—three of the most violent places in Iraq.
Many of the attacks on the schools have been gruesome.
"On March 25, terrorists attacked a secondary school in Anbar and beheaded a teacher," al-Korashi says. "In front of his students."
Al-Korashi claims that attacks on schools have dropped off since the end of February, but declines to provide any hard numbers. The reduction in violence, he says, has happened "because of the guards we have appointed to protect our children."
The ministry has assigned two guards to each schools, but teachers aren't impressed. For the most part, the guards are not armed.
"We collected donations from our salaries to buy weapons for the security guards," says Jalal Yassin Al-Nakash, a teacher at Al-Mansour Teacher's Institute, a specialized high school for students who want to teach. One of the school's buses was attacked on the way to school last month, and the drivers were killed.
Violence against students and teachers isn't the only problem that schools in Iraq are facing. Although coalition forces have often touted reconstruction in Iraqi schools as a sign of success—two years ago, war supporters made much of the fact that schools were being repainted—progress has been slow. The story of Bechtel is illustrative: the company subcontracted with Iraqis to fix more than 1,200 schools, painting and fixing the electrical wiring. But reports suggest that little has been done.
By the ministry's estimate, more than 1,300 of the country's schools have been so badly damaged that they have been marked for demolition. Iraq's classrooms remain overcrowded, with many schools working in two shifts in order to accommodate all their students—and that was before the system had to start shutting down schools in areas afflicted by sectarian violence.
"After fixing 1,900 schools, the reconstruction is continuing," Al-Korashi says. "But Iraq still needs 4,500 new schools. This money we are paying for security could be used to build schools. We could be building them in Amarra," he says. Amarra is the capital of Iraq's poorest govenorate, Misan, a place where security is not a problem but infrastructure is in poorer shape than anywhere else in the country.
