Violence disrupts Iraqi schools

The Iraqi school year began earlier this month, but as violence and political unrest… The Iraqi school year began earlier this month, but as violence and political unrest continue in the country, it is becoming more and more difficult for students to focus on their studies.

On Friday afternoon, the Pitt School of Education presented a free lecture featuring a group of three visiting panelists who have been on the ground in Iraq and other troubled nations. The panelists sought to explain the challenges of and advantages to bringing the availability of a safe academic education to the youth of Iraq.

The lecture, held in the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium and titled “Building Nations in Schoolyards: Views from the Trenches in Iraq and Other Nations in Crisis,” was the 13th in an ongoing series. The series, named for Paul H. Masoner, former dean of Pitt’s School of Education, addresses various global education issues.

The moderator was School of Education associate professor Maureen McClure, who is the director of the Global Information Network in Education Project – a “think tank” that deals with international education issues and works with humanitarian organizations like UNICEF and the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Senior Associate of Creative Associates International Frank Dall, who began the panel discussion, was first “embedded” with United States-led coalition forces in late April. Dall is one of the few non-military personnel currently free to come and go nearly anywhere in Iraq without having large bureaucratic restrictions placed on him.

His group, which runs educational development projects in countries around the world, is the lead organization working with the U.S. Agency for International Development for the reconstruction of the secondary education system – junior and senior high schools – in Iraq.

The U.S. Agency for International Development is a U.S. government “umbrella” contracting group that oversees the rebuilding of various Iraqi national infrastructures

Dall, along with his ground team of 150 nationals and 40 Iraqi expatriates, has been confronted with the once-highly functional Iraqi education system that, since the first Gulf War, has atrophied as resources to pay teachers and maintain schools were diverted by the government of Saddam Hussein.

“After this most recent conflict, the education system went down even further, or ground to a complete halt,” Dall said. “Ministries were bombed and looted, schools were destroyed, and children were pulled out of any that remained.”

His group started by leaving the “security shield” of coalition-guarded urban areas and, at great physical risk, scouring the length and breadth of the various regions of the country to find schools, teachers and administrators, from whom they could find out what the situation was and what they needed to operate once more.

Dall had previously worked for seven years before the war in Amman, Jordan, as UNICEF’s senior education officer for the Middle East region. He frequently dealt with Iraq’s Ministry of Education, and he said he was all too familiar with what they might discover.

What they found were many empty school buildings where looters had taken and sold everything, from desks to the wiring in the walls. They also found many teachers and administrators who were trying to make ends meet after years of earning next to nothing for their efforts, as well as students who had no learning materials or places to go to school.

The infrastructure would have to be repaired, he said, but workers could avoid the much higher costs of time and effort required by “starting from scratch,” as leaders are currently doing in places like Afghanistan, where there is no precedent of a quality national education system at all.

Through the Revitalization of Iraqi Schools and Stabilization of Education (RISE) Project, set up by USAid to get schools up and running, Dall’s group is using grants to repaint and repair schools, buy new desks and black boards, hand out more than a million school kits containing basic school materials like pencils and paper, and pay 75,000 teachers to teach 1.5 million secondary school students in 4,000 schools. To coordinate this effort, Dall’s group has set up four regional offices in Iraqi.

Frank Method, the director of the International Education Program for the Research Triangle Institute, also spoke in the discussion. Method has visited and assessed the state of education systems in war-torn countries around the world, including Iraq, and he gave some suggestions of how to establish a long-term, quality Iraqi education system.

Method said that a focus on the strengthening of infrastructure is the key to creating any kind of a long-term, self-sufficient Iraqi education system.

“It is not about paying teachers, but about how you pay them when there are no banking systems,” Method said.

He suggested the establishment of national standardized exams with certified committees to maintain their quality, a mobilization of resources to put government education expenditures at an average level of at least 25 to 30 percent, and the continuation of traditional Iraqi educational inclusion – relative to the inclusion in some neighboring Arab countries – of women as students and teachers.

Method said such measures would play a major role, not only in maintaining the quality of the education system, but in providing a symbolic national validation for an Iraqi government whose country is under constant threat of dissolving along ethnic and religious lines.

Pilar Aguilar, who is a senior research associate with UNICEF, was the final panelist of the lecture. Her organization, along with the Japanese developmental organization Japan International Cooperation Agency, has handled the efforts to organize the reconstruction of the primary, or grade school, education system in Iraq.

Aguilar stressed that, in countries in conflict, psychological ramifications affect children who were indoctrinated into cultures of violence. She said such effects had to be taken into account in education reconstruction efforts.

“How do you reconstruct the thinking of a child who, since the age of 7 years old has had a machine gun in their hand?” said Aguilar.

“You must have safe and healing education spaces to learn and reflect and return them to a more human normalcy,” she added.

Iraq’s dangerous environment for organizations, both military and civilian, can be illustrated by events on Oct. 27, when four separate suicide bomb blasts in Baghdad hit three Iraqi police stations, as well as the Iraqi headquarters for the International Red Cross. According to military coalition officials, first estimates of the blasts put the death toll at 30, with more than 200 wounded.

This attack came one day after a rocket attack on the Al Rasheed Hotel in the heart of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. According to a military coalition spokesperson, the rocket attack killed one person and injured 15 others, including 11 civilians.

During the question and answer portion of the lecture, one member of the audience touched on other long-term challenges by asking the panel how much of a role they thought AIDS, which is widespread in Africa, would play in the stability of an emerging Iraqi nation.

Dall responded that a 2001 UNICEF study, in which he participated, indicated that, of the 270 million people living in “Arab world” countries, about 400,000 people were infected with AIDS. The “Arab world,” defined by the survey, stretched from Morocco in the west to Iran in the east.

Dall added that the total number of cases could be 10 times as many, due to the social stigma of publicly reporting infection by the disease.

Infected Kuwaitis must flee their country for expensive treatment in Europe out of fear of persecution, Dall said. A largely conservative regional mindset, “porous” national borders allowing infected foreigners, and expensive testing methods all played roles in what he described as a growing regional pandemic that calls for strong health and education measures.