- BAGHDAD -ñ For 15
years, high school history teacher Abtsam Jassom has dutifully taught 20th-century
history according to the Baath Party. In it, America was the greedy invader,
every Iraqi war was justified and victorious, and Zionists were the cause
of world suffering.
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- Now, however, with the ouster of former President Saddam
Hussein, US officials say teachers will finally be free to teach a more
factual account of historical events. But the question is: Whose account
will that be?
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- The first indicator of what a Saddam-free education will
look like is arriving this month, as millions of newly revised textbooks
roll off the printing presses to be distributed to Iraq's 5.5 million schoolchildren
in 16,000 schools. All 563 texts were heavily edited and revised over the
summer by a team of US-appointed Iraqi educators. Every image of Saddam
and the Baath Party has been removed.
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- But so has much more - including most of modern history.
Pressured for time, and hoping to avoid political controversy, the Ministry
of Education under the US-led coalition government removed any content
considered "controversial," including the 1991 Gulf War; the
Iran-Iraq war; and all references to Israelis, Americans, or Kurds.
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- "Entire swaths of 20th-century history have been
deleted," says Bill Evers, a US Defense Department employee, and one
of three American advisers to the Ministry of Education.
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- The new downsized versions of textbooks underscore the
political challenge facing the primarily US-backed government, and the
private, and nonprofit groups charged with everything from rebuilding schools
to retraining teachers to rewriting text. While US advisers don't want
to be seen as heavy-handed in influencing the way Iraqis interpret history,
neither do they want to be in the position of endorsing texts that could
be anti-American, anti-Israeli, or radically religious.
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- As a result, some charge, in a matter of months Iraqi
education has gone from one-sided to 'no-sided.'
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- "We considered anything anti-American to be propaganda
and we took it out," says Fuad Hussein, the Iraqi in charge of curriculum
for the Ministry of Education. "In some cases, we had to remove entire
chapters."
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- So until curricula can be properly revised - which could
take years - it will largely be up to individual teachers to decide either
to ignore many historical events or to make their own judgments about what
and how students will learn about their past.
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- Sitting in the teachers' lounge in Al Huda High School
in the wealthy Al Jadriya district of Baghdad, Ms. Jassom first says she
will teach that "Americans are occupiers. They only want our oil."
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- A few minutes later, however, she changes her mind. "We
have seen what the old regime did - the mass graves, for example. The Americans
have freed us."
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- However, a mile away at Baghdad University's College
of Education for Women, Entedher al-Bable, who is studying to be a history
teacher, says she will instruct students that Iraq has a long history of
being invaded by the US.
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- "I will teach my students what I see: that Americans
are the terrorists. This is what I know and this is definitely what I will
teach." The circle of classmates surrounding Ms. al-Bable nod in agreement.
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- In the months immediately following the war, the bulk
of the attention to Iraqi education went to the physical reconstruction
of thousands of school buildings that had been destroyed in battle or in
postwar vandalism.
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- Curriculum revision ended up in the hands of Mr. Hussein,
a college lecturer who fled Iraq for the Netherlands in 1975. The US Defense
Department hired him to be part of the new Iraqi Ministry of Education.
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- In May, Hussein visited dozens of Baghdad schools and
selected 67 teachers with anti-Baath Party views. They met twice a week
at UNESCO and UNICEF offices, pencils in hand, deleting all Baath Party
ideology from Iraq's 563 K-12 texts.
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- A system with a brighter past
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- Hussein was returning to a very different school system
from the one he left in 1975. Early in his rule, Saddam was credited with
creating one of the strongest school systems in the Middle East. Iraq won
a UNESCO prize for eradicating illiteracy in 1982. Literacy rates for women
were among the highest of all Islamic nations, and unlike most Middle East
school systems, Iraqi education was largely secular.
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- But, in the decade after the 1991 Gulf War, UNICEF estimates,
school spending plummeted by 90 percent. Teachers' salaries dropped to
$6 a month and buildings deteriorated.
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- The US says Saddam starved the schools to spend money
on his palaces, but many Iraqis say United Nations sanctions are to blame
for crippling the school system - one small example of a contentious issue
history-textbook writers will grapple with.
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- By 2002, the US Agency for International Development
estimated that school enrollment had fallen to 53 percent.
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- But long before the decline in spending began to hurt
the Iraqi system, Saddam made his mark on curriculum. In 1973, Hussein
says, Saddam ordered all textbooks to be rewritten from the Baath Party
point of view, so lessons were intertwined with Baath Party ideology and
promilitary examples.
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- In writing exercises, students were instructed to copy
sentences like: "Jerusalem is always in Mr. Hussein's sight,"
and study the verb tense in sentences such as: "We do our best to
serve our country and our people. As our beloved leader, President Saddam
Hussein says, 'Serving the Iraqi people is a duty.' "
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- Now, in lifting all Baath Party references from texts,
some worry that too much else is being deleted with them.
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- In addition to expunged references to the 1991 Gulf War,
the Iran-Iraq War, and any mention of Israel (which doesn't even appear
on maps in Iraqi classrooms), some domestic issues have been erased as
well, such as Saddam's treatment of the Kurds and the ecological destruction
of the country's marshlands.
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- The treatment of the most recent war is of course one
of the most difficult topics to be tackled.
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- "The fall of Baghdad is very controversial,"
says Dr. Sami al-Kaisi, history professor at the Baghdad University College
of Education for Women. "We will need 20 to 30 years to reflect on
this before we can teach it properly."
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- Islamic law vs. Western values
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- Hussein says his team is also fighting pressure from
religious groups that hope to make inroads into the school systems in Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia as well.
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- "There was talk that the Americans are trying to
Westernize the curriculum and move it far from Islamic values," Hussein
recalls.
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- Indeed, Sheikh Abdul Settar Jabber, head of the Muslim
Awareness Association, a leading Sunni group, feels the entire role of
schools should be changed to one that trains students in Islamic law. He
opposes any US involvement in schools.
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- "We are an Islamic society and this is part of the
attempt by Americans to break Iraqi identity," says Mr. Sheikh Jabber.
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- In months ahead, Hussein will begin organizing a curriculum
committee that represents different religious, political, and ethnic groups
from around the country. US officials say most curriculum decisions will
be made after the civilian government leaves Iraq, and that they will play
a limited role - unless things go in a direction they don't approve.
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- "We will strongly recommend concepts of tolerance,
and be against anything that is anti-Semitic or anti-West - content that
would only sow the seeds for future intolerance," says Gregg Sullivan,
spokesman for the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau of the State Department.
"We'd hope it's only an advisory role, but if something develops that's
disadvantageous to the Iraqi people, we'd weigh in on a stronger level."
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- The best strategy for the US, say some, will be to get
as little involved as possible - even if it means allowing anti-American
passages in some texts.
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- "There's no room for George Washington and the cherry
tree in the Iraq curriculum," says Samer Shehata, assistant professor
of Middle Eastern Studies at Georgetown University. "It will backfire
if the US tries to overly secularize the curriculum."
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- Most nations - the US included - teach propaganda, says
James Loewen, author of the 1995 book, "Lies My Teacher Told Me."
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- But the danger of biased history texts, cautions Mr.
Lowen, may not be solely that students are misled - but rather that they
are bored.
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- When it comes to Iraqi texts, Lowen suggests that rather
than trying to wipe out all propaganda, the best course would be to leave
some in, paired with the same events written by US and other historians
- perhaps those in Turkey, Jordan, or Kuwait.
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- "Then supply additional information - accurate dates,
facts, etc.," says Lowen, "and let students think about it for
themselves."
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- Copyright © 2003 The Christian Science Monitor.
All rights reserved.
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- http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1104/p11s01-legn.html
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