“We do not want to study today,” students in one of Kurdistan’s institutes for higher education told their teacher. He was slightly put off by their request. What other reason was there for their attendance than to learn?
During the next lecture they told him he was going too fast. The teacher was just trying to follow the curriculum. To check what he was up against, he asked how many of them had attended the past lectures, and how many had done their homework. The answers made it all clear: Many had not attended nor asked their colleagues for the notes, and most had not bothered doing any homework.
The story illustrates one of the aspects of education in Iraqi Kurdistan: It is hard to get students to study. A foreign language teacher once told me she was getting desperate, as most of her students did not do their homework and for that reason could not learn to speak either.
I have at times compared a group of students in Kurdistan with a nest full of baby birds, who open their beaks to receive the food the parent is bringing in. A Kurdish graduate who studied abroad illustrated that by saying students in Kurdistan expect to be “spoon fed.”
The system is designed in such a way, that students do not have to show any initiative. As long as they just follow the instructions of their teachers, they will be OK. They just have to eat the food that is offered. Most of the work is memorizing, and that is what they will do just before their exams, to have forgotten most of that material within a couple of weeks.
Kurdish students get a big culture shock when they study abroad, as they are expected to depend on themselves. They have to find the food, cook it, put it on a plate and then eat it. Those who cannot, will fail their studies. Those who make the click, understand how much more useful this system is. By stimulating them to think, to chew before they swallow and to actively digest, the system makes sure they will remember far more and for a much longer time.
The Kurdish system stimulates copying and reproduction. I have seen it myself, and teachers told me that many Kurdish students copy-paste information from the Internet or out of books. But when they study abroad, they find plagiarizing is a sin and are forced to change their ways. It is not easy, when you have never been taught how to write an essay or research paper all by yourself!
What seems to be a system of education is also a major hurdle for Kurdistan’s development. Because this system mirrors a society in which people are waiting for the government to spoon feed them, instead of being stimulated to take initiatives to find their own food.
Kurds who finish their studies, wait for the government to offer them a job. Villages that are isolated from the world, wait for the government to give them roads. How often have I interviewed people in a deplorable situation, who were stuck mainly because they were waiting for the government to solve their problems… often for years on end.
We know there is a direct connection to the years under Saddam’s rule. The Iraqi dictator made Kurdish civilians dependent on the government, by destroying their villages and displacing the villagers to the towns. That dependence remains while his government has long gone.
Looking for a way to change it, we hit a circle. One way out, is making sure new generations become better equipped to stand on their own feet. And that can almost only be done by educating them in a different way.
If children learn from day one that the information will come their way, how can they be expected to do their own research? And let’s not even mention the fact that there is far more information out there than can be spoon fed to them. Yet the system does not stimulate inquisitive students, nor does it teach them to think for themselves.
Teachers, who have been brought up in this system, have to completely change their ways to make students work much more independently. And that should already start in primary school.
What we need might be a new generation of teachers, or at least training to get the present ones working in a different system. But most of all we need vision, and decision makers who understand the needs of education in the 21rst Century.
