Pupils in Baghdad Taught to Follow the Party Line : Education: A strong sense of nationalism is a recurrent theme, even in fourth-grade crayon drawings.

Two days into the new school year, the fourth graders, nicely turned out in white shirts and gray trousers and jumpers, sat attentively at their desks for geography class.

It began with the daily current affairs quiz. Mrs. Nasahah, the school’s director, conducted.

British colonialists separated Kuwait from the Iraqi motherland, she said. Why did they do that?

Several hands shot up, and Nasahah pointed to a girl in the first row. She rose and answered: “Because they wanted control. And the oil.”

What else? the director asked, this time pointing to a boy. “They wanted the seaport,” he responded, drawing a pleased smile from Nasahah.

And how did the Kuwaitis treat Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq War? “Very badly,” said a boy near the back of the room. “They stole our oil.”

The morning catechism instilling the government line caught the flavor of activities at Baghdad’s special Music and Ballet School for artistically gifted students. Summer vacation was over and there was fresh material for the new term.

In a drawing class, the teacher laid out the latest project for a visiting reporter, collages and crayon drawings depicting the justice of the Iraqi cause and the sins of its enemies.

Bashar Sabar, a talented 12-year-old, covered both aspects of the project. A brightly crayoned scene reminiscent of a 1960s’ U.S. peace poster showed a dove carrying a single palm frond--Kuwait--in its beak, returning it to the tree from which it had fallen, Iraq.

His second offering was a cartoon of a lumpy Saudi King Fahd pointing the way to Mecca to an American soldier riding an elephant. Why an elephant? “I like to draw elephants,” Bashar said.

The propaganda exercise was clearly a popular assignment. Every drawing bore a sense of enthusiasm. Even the Iraqi baby being denied a glass of milk had a smile on its face. No one drew bombs falling on Baghdad.

In the hallways, “Down With Bush” posters on the bulletin boards had a bright Day-Glo touch. In the classrooms, giggling girls passed notes on folded scraps of paper. It could have been a primary school in any Western country except for the message.

In her office, where small busts of Brahms, Mendelssohn and Beethoven sat atop the piano, Nasahah said, “Things are so much better now after the war with Iran.” She did not mention the invasion of Kuwait specifically, but the current crisis also was on her mind. “The world will need us before we need them,” she said.

A final message was stuck into a potted rose outside the school entrance. “You shall never kill the joy,” it read.

Graduates of the Music and Ballet School hope to move on to the University of Baghdad’s College of Fine Arts, a busy campus of old buildings on the edge of the Iraqi capital. The forecourt is filled with student sculptures, some of them copies of classical statuary and others whimsical. A seated male figure in white plaster bent forward like Rodin’s “The Thinker.” But his nose was painted red, a small sign of collegiate rebelliousness.

These are the best and brightest of Baghdad’s artistic students, taken into the campus of 2,000 or more on the basis of oral and written examinations and personality interviews.

Jabbar Obaidi, chairman of the audiovisual department who holds a communications Ph.D. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has hung a portrait on his office wall of a headless, barefoot man wearing a suit. “Humorous, don’t you think? You can see a French influence there,” he said.

But he pointed out that Iraqi nationalism is a recurrent theme in student works. “We don’t want to be liquidated in terms of our culture,” the American-trained professor explained. “Iraq says I’m an independent state in terms of life and in terms of respect.

“We are all very bothered about it,” Obaidi said of Western criticism of his country. “When our children see a picture of Bush, right away they cross it out. They tell me, ‘Dad, this is not our friend.’ ”

But within the universities and in the cultural world outside, Iraqi artists are affected by change in their own society. Recent Iraqi-made films such as “Apartment 13,” “Love in Baghdad” and “Social Life on a Bicycle” deal with historical, political and social themes.

“We used to live in the horizontal, in houses and on farms,” Obaidi said. “Now we are living vertically in apartment blocs. ‘Apartment 13’ was a filmmaker’s attempt to reflect that change in a humorous way, the necessary interactions when a stranger is living on the other side of your wall.”

The audiovisual students have put together a video on another problem in Iraq, a country of heavy smokers. The anti-smoking spot shows a man puffing on a cigarette while rising from a flip-top cigarette package. He then descends into the package, still puffing. But the next thing viewers see is a skeleton rising from that package with a cigarette butt between its teeth.

Last week, when the country’s 47,000 university students returned to campus, the young men and women at the College of Fine Arts sat among the forecourt statuary renewing acquaintances from the spring term. The atmosphere was loose, laughter frequent. In secular Iraq, men and women mix easily and each gender was sizing up the other. The Persian Gulf crisis appeared to have stopped at the university walls.

But last year’s male graduates--budding painters, filmmakers and sculptors--are in uniform, fulfilling their military commitment in a country that faces the prospect of its second war in a decade. For them, class is over.