Education Suffers on Both Sides of Divided Aleppo

Monday, 30 March, 2015

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Omar Yusuf

War has cast its dark shadow over the education system in Aleppo for more than three years now. Learning has become difficult for children living on either side of the lines, in areas held by the regime and its opponents.

Shelling has destroyed many schools, and hundreds of teachers have fled the country.

An estimated 90,000 students in rebel-held parts of this divided city attend lessons as the planes circle and bombs fall. The schools have very few resources, and their teachers are unqualified volunteers. For lack of any alternative, the government curriculum is still used.

According to a survey carried out by the Assembly of Free Engineers in Aleppo, 77 schools in some 17 rebel-held neighbourhoods have been damaged by shelling. Another survey, this one carried out by the Free Aleppo Council’s department of education, suggests that over 40 per cent of all schools have been shelled by government forces.

In the Amro bin al-Ass school in Old Aleppo, children persevere with their lessons in spite of the lack of heating to fend off the biting cold.

Ali, a teacher at the school, told Damascus Bureau about the challenges of working in a rebel-held area.

“We face a fundamental problem with the curriculum as we are still teaching the students a syllabus set by the regime, although we’ve eliminated the programme of nationalist education which brags about the regime’s imagined heroism, and couldn’t be further from the subject of Arab nationalism,” he said. “We also have a serious shortage of textbooks. For example, there are pupils at one school in the Mashhad neighbourhood who haven’t received any books yet, even though the academic year is nearly over. Obtaining books varies from one school to another.”

Teacher’s salaries are barely enough to get by on. But Ali views his work as a matter of integrity, as be believes education must continue despite the countless challenges.

The school principal, Mohammad Shabib, said that in the absence of formal financial support, most of the funding on offer comes with strings attached – religious and social ideologies.

Given the situation, Shabib says, “the results are quite acceptable given our modest means”.

“Last year, the results of the students applying for their secondary school certificates were quite good,” he added. “Even those who took their formal exams in regime-controlled areas got really good marks.”

Shabib lists the biggest challenges as the constant danger of barrel bombs dropped by government aircraft, the shortage of teaching materials for certain essential subjects like ninth-grade history, and the lack of specialist teachers. This last concern is a result of the meagre pay, which amounts to barely over one US dollar per lesson.

Shabib hopes that if schools gradually begin receiving financial support from the opposition administration’s education department, qualified teachers able to teach a more modern curriculum might return.

As for the pupils, their biggest wish is proper heating in the schools, especially for larger classrooms.

Some third-grade students told Damascus Bureau that they wished they received more encouragement from their teachers, because they had great ambitions for their futures. They also expressed hope officials would remember about heating, because they are terribly cold.

Um Mohammad waits at home for her children to arrive from school. Although she is afraid for them because of the barrel bombs, she believes going to school is better than sitting around at home, as it at least offers a basic level of education.

In regime-controlled areas, education officials have managed to rehouse most of the displaced people who have been sheltering in state schools in the city centre since the outbreak of the conflict. This has allowed lessons to resume.

According to one teacher called Jihad, educational standards in state schools are acceptable, as they have textbooks and a surplus of specialist teachers, even if a monthly salary is barely enough to last one week given the staggering inflation and the rising cost of electricity.

Private schools now exist in many Aleppo neighbourhoods like Firqan and Halab al-Jadida. They can hire teachers experienced in delivering the syllabus, and they appeal to both primary and secondary school pupils given the deterioration in state schooling.

Amjad, a secondary school pupil, says his local state school is unable to offer a well-rounded curriculum, and most teachers are unable to teach it properly. That spurred him to enrol at a private school despite the high tuition fees.

The ongoing battle for control of Aleppo has contributed to the decline of an educational system that was already struggling even before the conflict began, and that will see no improvement until the war ends.

(Some names have been changed for reasons of security.)

This story was produced by Syria Stories (previously Damascus Bureau), IWPR’s news platform for Syrian journalists.