New year brings new world, textbooks, to Iraqi schools

New year brings new world to Iraqi schools
U.S. revised textbooks, fired Baathist teachers
Vivienne Walt, Chronicle Foreign Service
Saturday, September 27, 2003

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/09/27/MN309262.DTL


Baghdad -- With Saddam Hussein gone and Iraq's economy in shambles, few changes since the war's end are likely to be as startling as those awaiting the nation's students when they return to class Wednesday to begin their first academic year without the dictator.

For Nidal Haj Majid, 42, a high school economics teacher in Babylon, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, a 20-year teaching career was one of predictable routine.

"We were ordered by the Education Ministry to collect money from all students each day," she recalled.

"When the kids arrived at 8 o'clock, they would give us money for pencils, books and for fixing the building," Majid said. "Then I would teach them about how wonderful the Iraqi economy was, because education was free."

But freedom from tuition was about the only freedom offered by Iraq's educational system under Hussein.

U.S. educators working in Iraq say classroom instruction relied on rote recitation and unquestioned obedience to the regime that ruled out any kind of critical thinking.

"Their minds have been totally closed," said Leslye Arsht, the U.S. senior adviser for Iraq's Ministry of Education, and a former education professor at Vanderbilt University. "Twenty years ago, Iraq had one of the best education systems in the region. But teachers have been starved of information for years. "


KEY TO HUSSEIN'S POWER
For decades, Hussein regarded education as key to his grip on power. Baath officials left their mark in virtually every classroom. Party teachings began at age 6, and millions of students were sent to party youth camps during the summer. "We must win the youth to guarantee the future," went a party slogan.

"The Education Ministry was regarded as the most important branch of government for the Baath Party," said Mohammed Mahmoud al-Amiri, 54, who supervises physical education teachers in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad.

"They wanted to make sure that this generation would do exactly what the government wanted."

After spending decades in exile, Hind Rassam Culhane, an educator from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., returned to Baghdad two months ago to help train Iraqi teachers. She said she was amazed how different students are today in contrast to her childhood of the 1950s.

"Children's minds have shrunk here. They have no imagination," she said. "They were taught only to memorize."

The U.S. occupation administration, which regards education as an essential ingredient in creating a democracy in postwar Iraq, has rushed to introduce reforms and raise monthly teacher salaries from $15 along with tips from children seeking higher grades before the invasion to $160 a month.


TEXTBOOKS REVISED
A team of Iraqi officials spent the summer expunging 17 million textbooks of Baath Party teachings and passages of Hussein's life and revising chapters under a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Countless photographs of Hussein have been deleted not only from books but school calendars, and classroom walls. At Nile primary school in Baghdad's Mansour district, workers Wednesday put a second coat of white paint over a favorite Hussein slogan that had decorated a courtyard wall: "Always look your enemy in the eye."

Excising the influence of Hussein and the Baath Party has also included a purge of the teaching profession.

Thousands of teachers and administrators were demoted or fired by American occupation authorities for being ranking members of Hussein's Baath Party. That, and the need to refurbish hundreds of schools, pushed the opening of school back one month.

Earlier this month, the U.S.-endorsed Governing Council went a step further,

voting to block all Baathists from government jobs, including teaching. Council members argued that the former mouthpieces of government propaganda should not be sent back into the classroom.

The U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, who has the power to veto the Governing Council's laws, has not yet approved the council's decision. In one of the first major clashes between the council and U.S. officials, Bremer has said the firing of thousands of teachers would result in upheaval and further delay the start of school.

The problem is not one that will be easily solved.


PARTY MEMBERSHIP PERVASIVE
"There is not a teacher in this room who was independent of the Baath Party, " said Bader Hanoonal-Dirawi, a 41-year-old biology teacher from Basra, who attended a recent USAID-sponsored training seminar in Baghdad.

Iraqi teachers are also having to absorb new and unfamiliar methods.

At a six-day crash course, educators Arsht and Culhane taught their counterparts techniques that encourage feedback between students and teachers - - a dizzying concept for most of the Iraqis. After a 30-minute discussion, many concluded that the ideas would be difficult to implement.

"This American style is completely new for us," said Badriyah al-Waeli, 50, who supervises history teachers at a high school in Amariyah, west of Baghdad. "The teachers will need some time to adjust, and children will have to learn to discuss their ideas."

Waeli said teachers will steer clear of modern history until a new crop of textbooks can be prepared.

"There were about six lines (in the old textbooks) about the 1991 Gulf War, " she said. "We taught kids that the Americans launched an aggression against us, and then foreigners came and caused trouble in the south," referring to the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq after the conflict.

Majid, the economics high school teacher from Babylon, says both students and teachers will muddle through in coming months.

"For the children, Saddam was portrayed as a kind of God," Majid said. "This is going to take time to change."