Iraqi Schools Are Running, but Textbooks Lag

The sayings of Saddam Hussein are gone, but the fifth-grade textbook still includes a curious call to arms, exhorting Iraqis to unite “against invasion and foreign powers.”

All references to the dictator were quickly removed from textbooks after his ouster two years ago, but students in the nation’s 16,000 schools are still waiting for revised civics lessons reflecting the post-Hussein national narrative.

Soon after the U.S.-led invasion, an effort was launched to write new civics books grounded in the principles of democracy, law and human rights. But the process has stalled amid inaction on the part of Iraq’s highly centralized Education Ministry.

As a result, schools now face another year using stopgap texts that sprinkle lessons in government with the teachings of the prophet Muhammad.

The issue of updating civics instruction has attracted little attention amid a bloody insurgency and sputtering efforts to restore public utilities, transportation and health care.

In fact, public education has been one of the relative success stories of the U.S. occupation. Hundreds of schools have been refurbished. As the second school year since the invasion draws to an end, schools across the country are functioning and attendance is recovering from prewar lows.

But just as Iraq’s newly elected leaders struggled to form a government from the nation’s contentious mix of ethnic, sectarian and political factions, educators have been unable to write a new history for Iraq.

Americans who advised the ministry during the first year of the occupation said a program was underway to develop the new lessons by January. But the commission set up to write the texts has not had any meetings. Now, the Americans said, it appeared unlikely that books could be ready by the start of the new school year in October.

Former interim Education Minister Sami Mudhaffar, the third appointee to that post since the invasion, declined to be interviewed. In contrast to a year ago, when Western journalists routinely visited Iraqi classrooms, the ministry denied a Times request to observe civics lessons in Baghdad schools.

In a telephone interview, the former deputy general for curriculum, Abdulzahra Baqir, said the lesson development had not begun because “first we wanted the elections to finish, then we were waiting for the government to be formed.” The new education minister, Abdul Falah Hassan, declined to be interviewed until he had had time to assess his new job.

Muhsin Abd Ali, the new director of curriculum, said the work would resume in the coming weeks. But the effort would be complicated by the fluidity of the governing process.

The primary task of the transitional government formed this month is to shepherd the country while lawmakers draft a new constitution, which is to be put to a national referendum in October. Then fresh elections are scheduled for December.

But even with a constitution and permanent government, formidable obstacles to distilling the essential Iraqi story remain. For one thing, the framers of the new curriculum will have to sort out differences in the way Iraqis think of nationality, which in one context can mean their nation state, but in another can refer to pan-Arabism.

Another thorny question is how much to acknowledge the contributions of past leaders, including even Hussein, who oversaw a modernization of Iraq before his slide into despotism.

And what of the Hashemite monarchs installed by the British when they carved the modern nation state out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire after World War I? Or Gen. Abdul Karim Qassim, who overthrew the monarchy in 1958 only to be killed in a 1963 coup?

Certainly, no one has the universally beloved stature of a unifying national figure.

Perhaps someone on the political stage today will be this nation’s George Washington. But in the current state of flux, it is impossible to predict whether it will be a statesman or a cleric, let alone pinpoint the individual.

Asked to name the key figure in Iraq’s emerging democracy, one American educator named Iyad Allawi, the U.S.-backed expatriate who was named to lead the previous government. But Allawi has been sidelined by the new administration.

Another suggested Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country’s leading Shiite Muslim religious leader, who pressed for direct elections and has stilled the potential for civil strife by asking his followers not to retaliate for attacks by Sunni insurgents.

Americans who have worked with Iraqi educators don’t see these problems as insurmountable.

“Since World War I, they have been one political unit,” said Bill Evers of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who advised the Coalition Provisional Authority on education. “There are plenty of countries that have a shorter history.”

Another U.S. advisor to the Education Ministry, Bay Area consultant Pamela Riley, said the process got off to a good start when then-minister Aladdin Alwan convened a conference with experts from the Czech Republic last year, hoping to draw lessons from another nation that broke from a totalitarian past.

But the momentum died after Alwan was replaced, Riley and others said.

“Nobody has been pushing it,” said Mishkat Moumin, former interim environment minister, who was involved in early curriculum discussions. “It seems the new minister is not as interested in this and there is controversy.”

Moumin said those discussions wrestled with how to balance religious and national values, and decided the curriculum should be neutral on religion.

“Religious ideas should be stated in religious books,” she said.

At the same time, there has been pressure from the majority Shiite bloc in the new government for an increased religious orientation in the curriculum.

The hastily written text being used this year reflects the extent to which religion and state are intertwined in the Iraqi consciousness.

Parts of it have a secular slant, enumerating the basic rights of man. It begins with the declaration “I have a right to a clean environment,” a sentiment that is, at best, idealistic in a country where children walk by pools of sewage and fuel spills from generators on their way to school.

It also forcefully spells out the principle of equality under the law. “No citizen, because of sex, religion, language, belief or nationality shall be different under the law,” it says.

But to define other basic concepts, it refers to the Koran.

“If they want to achieve their goals of freedom, democracy, justice,” the book says of Iraqi citizens, “they have to be like our prophet Muhammad said: ‘Believers are like a body.... If there is something wrong with one part of the body, all of the body is aching from that part.’ ”

Tamara Quinn, also a former U.S. advisor to Iraq, said she thought the reference was put in because it was safe.

“Nobody,” said Quinn, who is now director of the School Partners Program of the Berkeley nonprofit Spirit of America, “is going to say you couldn’t put Muhammad in there.”