Disclaimer: This is an article on education.
Wait a minute, did you just think why am I writing on education when the Kurdistan Region has more important issues to contend with such as Daesh, Erbil-Baghdad relations, and oil?
Really? You too?
It is the beginning of the school year. New stationery and uniform, brand new notebooks carefully labeled with our best handwriting; pencils warily picked from all the different colours and types, and above all new classrooms and teachers. The best time to make good first impressions for the year to come. These were the memories of our first day of school, every academic year. Remember?
As the curtains to the new school year opened earlier in the month this was not the picturesque scenario for 1.7 million students in 6, 800 schools across the Kurdistan Region.
Recently a Facebook video went viral after a young girl (around nine-years-old) returned home from the first day of school crying. Still in her uniform, she sobs to her parents: “We were not taught anything today,” adding her teacher was upset as she was unpaid.
School was a ‘joke’ the girl complains in distress, still in her school uniform.
Regrettably, this is the torment of our children in 2016.
My friend, a mother of two, who took out her two boys from private school due to her financial status was in tears, explaining the poor education quality and lack of motivation from the teachers in the new public school.
“They [teachers] take out their frustration on the students.”
Ask any parent (and nation), the ambiguity of a child’s future lies in the prospects of a poor education system. Hence, poor quality education reflects in the future citizens we will have.
How can the Kurdistan Region ensure quality education when teachers are concerned over their unpaid rent? How can quality education be assured when 50, 000 educators are on the streets threatening a strike just as the new school year begins?
50, 000 unhappy teachers imply over 1 million students will be affected (that is, if on average every teacher has only 30 students).
I am not claiming that the Kurdistan Region has the best of teachers and our education system is like no other in the world. In fact, it is relatively the opposite. However, such brittle system can easily fragment.
We still have an education system where 18-year-olds finish 12 years of school and are still clueless of what hobbies they enjoy, lack the confidence to speak in front of a group of people, express their own views on certain issues, or have any life skills.
Completing a difficult mathematical equation or knowing every single date in history off by heart is not my definition of education.
Measures could have been taken (and it is still not too late) for education to remain unaffected in the current economic and political crises.
A warning to the KRG: Alongside a whole list of negative consequences a failed education system with no doubt breed little --not so cute-- Daesh-ies in our own neighborhoods.
As the little girl in the Facebook video said: awa koo dabi or how could this be?
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
