Syria’s Curriculum Changes: What Are We Teaching the Next Generation?
When Education Becomes a Battleground: The Syrian Curriculum Crisis
Education remains one of the greatest sources of hope especially for the young, as well as turning point upon which the future can be determined. Yet in Syria Today, this safety net is threatened. Its new rulers recently changed the whole school curricula across the country and this has attracted lot of anger and concern. This is not about change, but a radical transformation in what young Syrians are being taught about their history, their religious and political identity and destiny. In many, these changes are seen as an effort to re-write the very essence of a country — a soul of a nation, so to speak.
One of the insidious features of today’s Cultural Revolution is a desire to simply eliminate the past, and suppress pride.
Calling each of them to picture being a young Syrian student whose textbook has no reference for Queen Zenobia, a figure that was an embodiment of power, intelligence and resilience. An historical figure was one of the leaders of the Syrian uprising against the Romans and became another Syrian landmark. Now, she’s gone. The same is Khawla bint Al-Azwar, a women, who is still regarded as the iconic warrior women of Arab world. These omissions are not just cleanings up of language; they are erasures of existence.
In the absence of these stories, what takes the place? What kind of future is created when children are deprived of figures with which they can identify and which present such qualities as courage and perseverance? Such characters need to be replaced with either silence or introduction of bleak figures and doctrines which will only create seeds of compliance and terror instead of curiosity and pride.
Science, Logic And Rationality: Under Attack
The changes are evident not only in history. A lesson on brain evolution? Gone. Evolutionary theory? Not even mentioned. Had these omissions been ideological decisions, it would have been worrying, but it is even worse when such omissions are anti-intellectualist in nature that denies scientific rationality and critical thinking. Syrian young generation who had lived through so many losses now get the education that does not prepare them to think critically, to invent, to imagine.
And that is not about the facts being alienated — it is about the view being forced. The curriculum deludes its learners to predict answers based on narrow dogmas rather than encouraging scientific inquiry. But how can a generation armed with half-truth and selective facts aspire to succeed in a globalized, post scientific, post-truth environment?
The Dangerous Shift in Values
The most disturbing change seems to be the subject of Islamic education. The phrase “defending the homeland has hence been succeeded by the phrase “for the sake of God.” This change is not a quiet kind of change. This focalises religious devotion rather than the public loyalty. Such rhetoric is a bad decision for a country as diverse as Syria, which is de facto going towards further exclusion.
What this reconfiguration of patriotism does is to propagate a mental orientation that makes religious affiliation paramount to citizenship, national unity and social coexistence. It is a soil for radicalization it is the fourth front that has devastated Syria in the last ten years. We should wonder how a child would grow up loving his country when his education system inculcates him into believing in an ideology more than anything else.
For many Syrian refugees that are still living in camps as well as the millions of other Syrians who took refuge in different countries the dream to overcome the conflict and start a better life for their kids is real. But how can parents take their children back to a country of education system whose, as perceived here, main purpose is to divide only the working populace and make them fanatics?
They opine that education is a potent factor of reconciliation and rebuilding process that delays consolidation. It is indicated to be the basis of message, meaning and rapprochement. IS used to recruiite their suicidal minions in refugee camps, and now, educating the young refugees in segregation and violence, Syria leadership is preparing them to be warriors in future battles.
Syria: Gathering for a Future to be Defended
As such you have curriculum transformation that may at times surface as a mere textual language that resides within the curriculum documents but the ramifications are monumental and-global in that they posit scores of future for a nation. Education is not simply a process of receiving values in respect of various subjects and field rather it is a process of building and nurturing up the minds and the souls. What if the stories that children listen to give them a message to be afraid instead of learning something new, to listen instead of imagining something colourful.
