Iraq is blessedly free today, but it's also a mess in need of reconstruction. Not least among the many challenges facing those now tackling this massive project is creation of a new education system.
Once upon a time, Iraq had a well-functioning, if less than universal, 1920's-style British-style education system, consisting of primary and secondary schools and eight tertiary institutions, including a well-regarded medical school in Baghdad and one of the oldest Islamic universities on earth. After becoming a republic in 1958, Iraq strove to expand education access and boost literacy levels. The Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein, however, like all totalitarian governments, reshaped the system in its own image and, while technical training remained solid and contributed to Iraq's development (including its prowess with nasty weapons), the rest suffered mightily, including the notion that education should teach children to think and reason for themselves and to possess accurate information about their country and their world. All teachers had to join the Ba'ath party. And the curriculum was devoted to what a Washington Post correspondent termed "martyr building," with hyper-nationalistic and militaristic lessons that glorified Saddam while demonizing the west in general, the U.S. in particular, Israel, etc. An Iraqi ??migr?? recalls her teacher giving a lesson on Hitler's greatness "because he put the Jews in a room and burned them."
This perversion of an education system was further degraded after the Gulf War as economic sanctions, brain drains, inter-group conflict and the grim state of Iraqi domestic affairs caused schools to crumble, teachers to quit (or go unpaid), attendance to plummet, tuition charges to be instituted and everything to be in short supply. U.N. statistics indicate that the average Iraqi boy over 15 has less than 5 years of schooling and nearly half of Iraqi girls have none. Recent weeks of bombing, looting and burning (including the education ministry headquarters) have administered the coup de grace to the old system - and created a golden opportunity to build a new one.
Who will do the building, however, remains in dispute (along with much else about Iraq's postwar reconstruction) as sundry U.S. agencies, Iraqi exile groups and international organizations vie for leadership roles, even while asserting that important decisions ought to be made by the people of Iraq. The State Department has hosted at least one meeting of an Education Working Group, comprised of Iraqi-born scholars and educators. The Pentagon has been calling around in search of suitable U.S. experts to advise the new education ministry. And the Agency for International Development has just let a $62 million contract to a private Chevy Chase firm called Creative Associates International (CAI) to help rebuild Iraq's education system. (For a description of CAI, see http://www.caii.net/Corporate%20Profile/corporate%20profile%20description.htm). Sundry U.N. agencies are also stirring on the education front, along with a host of non-governmental outfits.
Besides working through the leadership confusion and finding means to begin meeting Iraq's urgent infrastructure needs - food, water, law and order must precede even education - some immense issues will need to be resolved as Iraq's postwar education system takes shape. Six seem especially vexing.
First, will that system be modeled on another country's or shaped indigenously? There's no point in needlessly reinventing wheels - and Iraq could do a lot worse than to emulate one of the world's successful education systems. Yet many people are skittish about outsiders - especially the U.S. - "imposing" an outside model, as we more-or-less did in Japan and Germany after World War II. (People who tend toward such skittishness conveniently overlook the fact that both of those conquered lands went on to prosperity, democracy and functioning civil societies.)
Second, how will it deal with Iraq's many factions and ethnicities? Modern Iraq was a nervous mix of Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Turks, "marsh Arabs" and other subpopulations even before Saddam pitted them against one another. This will lead some to favor a pluralistic, perhaps federal-style education system with a lot of local control, rather than a single, centralized "ministry" approach. Others, no doubt, will argue that "nation building" demands a common curriculum and shared institutions.
Third, how will it balance Islam against secular, modern "scientific" education? Those who recoil from the madrasas of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim lands, with their emphasis on religious fundamentalism and anti-Americanism and their inattention to math and science, will push for secularism and probably for government-run schools, but the appetite of many Iraqis for a strong religious influence will be keen and, especially until there are robust secular institutions to counteract that influence, it may prove insatiable.
Fourth, how will the new education system deal with the legacy of the old one - the hyper-politicized textbooks, the Ba'athist teaching staff, the Saddamized bureaucracy? It's so laborious, costly and slow to start afresh that there will be a mighty temptation to recycle what's left of the old system's assets, such as they are.
Fifth, will the world's loopier educationists be turned loose to substitute Dewey, Freire, multiple intelligences, expanding environments and whole language for Ba'athist militarism? More benign, yes, but not necessarily a wise course of action if one cares about children actually learning! CAI may do fine work - they're already an A.I.D. contractor in Afghanistan and other lands - but their education team is less than overwhelming and they have relied on the ed school at George Washington University for policy wisdom. (The Iraq project will reportedly use education specialists from American University - another scary prospect - and Research Triangle Institute.) Moreover, the federal RFP to which they responded asked for bidders to "promote child-centered, inquiry-based, participatory teaching methods". In other words, for constructivism-on-the-Tigris. Not only does this version of schooling run afoul of many Mid-eastern cultural patterns and education traditions - it's not even very effective in the West, popular as it is amongst educationists. If dubious ideas and their purveyors end up shaping Iraq's post-war education system, it could easily turn out to be a disappointment - and the U.S. taxpayer's money won't be well spent.
Sixth and finally, will anyone think creatively about what a brand-new education system might be - and how it might differ from our primordial assumptions? What about "virtual" schooling, for example, instead of endless bricks and mortar? What about the choices that might be built in from the start for families and communities that don't all see the world identically? What about educating parents as well as children? What about outsourcing instead of bureaucrat-run schools and colleges? Education in Iraq is indeed a massive challenge, but in its present collapse can be glimpsed the outlines of something very different. That isn't likely to happen, however, if the usual suspects end up in charge and the usual ideas end up in their usual places.
"For One Small Education Company, Iraqi Schools Are a Huge Challenge," by Neil King, Jr., The Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2003
"2 rebuilding pacts awarded: N.C., D.C. firms to get $10 million total for working in Iraq," by Jackie Spinner, The Washington Post, April 12, 2003
"U.S. to remake school system in postwar Iraq," by Mary Ann Zehr, Education Week, April 16, 2003
