Copyright csmonitor
Syria’s new school year, the first since the ouster of autocratic President Bashar al-Assad, kicked off with a double challenge for teachers: Classes started without printed textbooks, but with a new curriculum. For Firas Shaheen, a history and geography teacher who has spent nearly two decades teaching across Syria’s shifting front lines, that latter challenge is likely to be the tougher of the two. To him, a curriculum is more than a set of lessons; it is a blueprint for how a nation understands itself. Setting a new one is a high-stakes enterprise in a country emerging from war and economic collapse, where many children grew up under bombardment and hunger. “Education must align with state policy and national identity to strengthen national belonging and develop a generation away from violence and conflicts,” says Mr. Shaheen, who teaches at two private schools in war-shattered Douma, near Damascus. As classes resumed, teachers across Syria pored over hastily circulated PDF versions of the new curriculum, trying to understand what had survived and what had been cut under President Ahmed al-Sharaa, an Islamist former rebel commander who promises reform. “Changing the curriculum is harder than changing the constitution,” Education Minister Mohammed Abdul Rahman Turko said on Al-Arabiya’s Mazeej podcast in mid-September. Rebuilding, he noted, presents a major challenge. Syria has 253,000 teachers and 19,400 schools, nearly 40% of which are in ruins. The education system currently serves 4.2 million students, while another 2.4 million have dropped out. The ministry expects 1.5 million displaced children to return from Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan over the coming year. Rather than undertake a full overhaul, the ministry recycled older materials while making selective revisions: History and geography saw the most changes; religion and math expanded; foreign languages were reduced. Gone is the “National and Social Education” course revamped in 2017, which merged civics with loyalty to the Assad family. Teachers offer mixed views. While many agree on the importance of fostering Syrian unity, they differ sharply on how much space Islam should occupy and how to teach a history marked by conflict and division. Shifting history In areas like Douma and the mixed city of Homs, where bombed-out neighborhoods recall the war’s worst memories, teachers interpret the revisions through the lens of their own experiences and communities struggling to rebuild. “The current curriculum describes events as they truly occurred, including the security repression of the Assad regime,” says Mr. Shaheen. A graduate of the University of Damascus, he began his career in public schools under Assad rule. He later taught in rebel-held, besieged Douma, then in Turkish-administered schools for displaced Syrians in the north, before eventually returning to Douma after Mr. Assad’s fall. He has watched textbooks’ accounts of the same events rewritten to fit new political realities. Today’s history lessons no longer glorify the “Corrective Movement” of 1970, when Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, seized power in a military coup, nor the “October Liberation War” of 1973, Syria’s short but emotionally charged battle with Israel over the Golan Heights. The portrayal of other powers mirrors diplomatic developments. “Turkey was once described as the Ottoman occupation,” Mr. Shaheen says, recalling how its image improved after 2000 when relations between Damascus and Ankara warmed, only to turn negative again after Turkey supported Syrian rebels. The Ottoman period, in the current telling, is “good in its early days,” when it supported Arab administration. “Whenever a regime changes or the controlling forces in a region change, it is natural that the curriculum changes according to the policies of those controlling powers,” Mr. Shaheen says. For Zeina Khiti, also a geography and history teacher in Douma, the challenge is to rebuild from intellectual rubble. “Students only learned about their towns or neighboring areas through news reports: who was bombed, who was displaced, who protested,” she says. The Assad-era curriculum, she explains, “isolated Syria from its surroundings entirely,” leaving students unaware of the Arab world or even their own country’s geography. “Students in middle and high school do not know the necessary information about their country – its terrain, soil, climate, resources, and natural wealth,” she says. In the mixed city of Homs, still grappling with post-war violence, teachers face a different reality. They describe a struggle over facts, memory, and the role of religion and reasoning. Some note that students from neighborhoods that remained under Mr. Assad’s control during the war tend to be on better academic footing than their displaced counterparts. Reciting Quran correctly At the Suhail Jaber Abdo primary school, assistant principal Shaza al-Mustafa notes the centrality of religion in the new curriculum. “The religion class hours have increased, and the curriculum emphasizes Quranic verses and Hadiths about ethics and coexistence,” says Ms. Mustafa. Religion teacher Ghadd Tomeh is delighted. “The curriculum has improved,” she says. “The old curricula focused mainly on ethics, but now we cover more aspects related to Islamic religion.” Now students are expected to memorize longer Quranic verses and apply moral lessons to daily life. For the first time, upper primary students are learning to recite the Quran correctly. “The Quran disciplines students and instills religious and ethical values,” adds Ms. Tomeh, acknowledging that the verses resonate differently with different children. Some of her students are Alawite, others Sunni, and a few have recently returned from displacement in the north. “With diversity, each student understands Islam from their own perspective,” she says. Around the corner, at the Ahmed Mutaib Darwish High School for boys, a history teacher says the new curriculum feels like a step backward. “The old curriculum was more modern and analytical,” says the teacher, requesting anonymity. “Now we have returned to memorization. It is more intensive, and entire historical eras are presented focusing only on the negative aspects, ignoring positives.” She has taught since 2020 but fears the latest political shifts could see her reassigned to a distant rural post. It’s a quiet way, she says, of pushing teachers out under new education authorities dominated by natives of Idlib, the rural province that launched the campaign ousting President Assad. Several of her female Alawite colleagues, who were relocated to rural areas, resigned because they did not feel safe there. Sectarian and political bias, she says, still seep through the new textbooks. She cites a historical passage that once recognized three revolutionary leaders – Sunni, Druze, and Alawite – symbolizing the country’s diversity. Now a second Sunni leader has replaced the member of the Alawite sect, which supported the Assad family. The changes also intrude on family life. “The child asks questions when they see that their mother is not wearing a hijab, and the curriculum says an unveiled woman is sinful,” she says. “How will the child view their mother?” Less foreign language instruction School director Bashar al-Ali notes that the classroom itself has transformed. Many Shiite and Alawite families have left Homs, replaced by returnees and displaced students who had fled to Turkey, Jordan, and northern Syria. “These students’ educational levels are very weak,” he says. “A student entering the 11th grade is equivalent to an eighth-grade student here in Syria.” He also laments what has been stripped from the curriculum. Foreign-language instruction, widely seen as a bridge to opportunity, has sharply decreased. French in the Baccalaureate dropped from five hours per week to one hour. Russian is not currently taught. “I am in favor of keeping it because a second language develops student skills, whether Russian or French,” Mr. Ali says. “A second language is good for the student’s professional future.” For Hiba Mahmoud al-Ashqar, a social studies teacher at a girls’ school in Homs that is guarded by an armed sentry, the deeper loss is the erosion of critical thinking. “The goal,” she says, “should be to give students an accurate understanding of their rich history, away from extremism and sectarian ideology, producing an educated and aware generation.” Syria’s Ministry of Education spokesperson declined to comment for this story.
