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Like a sounding alarm, the events of the past two years shook us all to our core. While we continue to witness our dehumanization, there is an undeniable sense of helplessness looming over conversations about what is happening in our region. After hours of conspiracy theorizing, realizing our Goliath is too big and abstract, the most constructive conversations conclude with a simple call to action: A resolve to do what we can in our own little respective corners of the world. Mine happens to be a middle school classroom.
Prompted by a sense of responsibility as a teacher, I marched to a nationalist regional drumbeat of belonging and rolled up my sleeves ready to tell my little corner of the world about what is happening in their world, only to find myself tongue-tied.
Reading up on the crises in Syria, Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon, Sudan, Congo and beyond felt like trying to untangle a mangled mess of events. Between contradicting narratives, biased media, proxy warfare and shadowed agendas, I found it difficult to understand the ins and outs of our complex histories to properly add context to current events. How can I teach my students about the world when I can barely make sense of it myself?
Despite years of certified international education, I felt illiterate. Sometimes trying to make sense of the news feels like studying a course without completing its prerequisites.
Without adequate transparency from sources, how do we have constructive conversations about foreign interests in the region? How do we make tangible the abstract but undeniable echoes of imperialism we see in multiple parts of the Global South? How do we quantify the worth of our plundered resources and qualify ourselves ready to manage it better?
The purpose of education at its most basic level is to prepare us for the challenges of life. Be they political, social, environmental or economic, students should have the proper tools and skill sets to understand and address them. Looking around at the world and back to my classroom, I wonder if that is still the end goal.
If you look up the history of education, you’ll find that our current model is still largely based on the Prussian model from the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s. Students are still grouped in age-based cohorts, outputted one year after the other, like a factory line until they graduate. While its approach may seem a bit robotic and dystopian, at its heart the objective back then was a more egalitarian attempt at providing free education and higher order skills to the general public in Europe and the United States.
What does this have to do with us? Along with colonialism, this model of education took hold in the region in the early 1900s after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. When France and Britain divided up the Middle East into separate mandates, they instilled their education systems to indoctrinate their culture and ideals and create the workforce and mid-level bureaucrats needed to power industries. France francophoned Lebanon, Syria, Tunis, Morocco and Algeria, while Britain anglicized Egypt, Palestine, Iraq and Jordan.
In the decades following World War II, when countries started waking up to their independence, adjustments were made to make education more accessible, but the main factory model persisted. And that is not the only thing that persisted. Today, while on paper we’re liberated-yet looted, and independent-yet indoctrinated, our minds are still tethered to colonial times, looking up north to elevate our status.
Our public systems being subpar, we turn to private schools for a better education. In this part of the world, almost all of them boast a serious array of acronyms to assure parents that their children’s education is coming from abroad – a better and more certified source. Understandably, parents would not want to take risks with their children’s education and subsequent future. But in the light of today, can we still trust that those systems provide the education we want our children to have?
Like many in my generation, I was educated in international schools. Throughout my upbringing my textbooks, lessons, all my figures of authority and sources of information, the people that taught me, tested me, graded me, and validated my intellectual existence, all spoke in a language foreign to my own. Consciously or not, this affirms and formalizes the superiority of a foreign language and culture over our own.
The Eurocentric “world history” and geography lessons I studied are still being taught today. They cover a wide range of topics from ancient civilizations to the Cold War but don’t shed light on our land. Even when paired with the national curriculum, my learning left me mostly uninformed about our more recent histories or geopolitics and did not prepare me to look at world events with a critical eye. When I share this core shame with neighbors from my age bloc, I realize I’m not struggling alone.
We study eras in history and mark time with the influence and legacy of civilizations: the Greeks, the Romans, and the Renaissance, skipping over a Golden Age when our region prevailed. We celebrate achievements and advancements in sciences, mathematics, medicine, literature and the arts with very little notable contributions from our part of the world. We learn the names of Einstein, Davinci and Marie Currie, without crediting their Arab predecessors.
For a thousand years, between the 7th and the 16th century, the Middle East was a region of knowledge, innovation and social development. Scholars made groundbreaking contributions that paved the way for the Renaissance. Figures like Al-Khawarizmi, the father of Algebra (a word rooted in the Arabic language), Avicenna, whose medical texts Europe relied on for centuries, and Ibn Al-Haytham, known today as the father of optics, revolutionized their fields.
Poets and philosophers like Rumi and Al-Farabi enriched global literature and thought. Women were celebrated for their contributions: Mariam Al-Ijlyah crafted astrolabes that expanded knowledge of the universe, while Fatima Al-Fihri founded the world’s oldest university Al-Qarawiyyin that still stands today in Fez, Morocco. Schooling and public educational complexes were not only commonplace, but seriously regarded, and helped the civilization flourish. This era reminds us that our region was once at the forefront of human progress. From our first sip of morning coffee to the moment we finally get to put our feet up, our days can still be traced back to the Ottomans.
Learning this is important not only for the intercultural respect that has been taking a beating since 9/11, but to feed a generation hungry for relevance and a greater understanding of their scientific history. And they are hungry. When my kids in class hear the simple mention of Al-Alamein as one of the battle sites in WW2, their ears perk up, shocked and elated to see something of their world in a world they are learning about. This erasure of regional contributions can leave them feeling influentially impotent, and teach them to look outward for progress.
I do not subscribe to the notion that international education is a brainwashing machine or that it comes with ill-will, but evidently, it is currently inadequate in helping us understand our world or in familiarizing us with our problems, let alone in preparing us to deal with it. There is a definite disconnect between international curricula and local realities. Today’s complex issues highlight the urgent need for an education system that equips students to understand and address them.
Education in most of the world comes from a few select certified sources, and I do understand the need for standardized testing to guarantee quality. But I am a product of that quality. That quality did not qualify me to navigate my world’s problems and left me disengaged from it. So in the hope that my kids turn out better than I did, I no longer wish to perpetuate this lack. What if we finally recognize this lack and explore the possibility of creating our own standards and designing our own curricula?
Whether home-grown or not, the dream is to see an education that is regionally relevant, perpetuates a proud identity, sense of belonging, and engages students with their social, political and geographical environments instead of alienating them from it. Instead of only learning our basic geography, we should learn to read into strategic locations and straits when attempting to decipher today’s conflict zones. We have to study and explore the value of our region’s resources and how to manage it all better.
When exploring topics like climate change, water stress and exploding population demographics, we should calculate and know their impact on our own societies. We should not only learn the basics of economics, but go further and analyze the case studies of countries stuck with unsuccessful megaprojects that left them anchored with international debts.
When learning about the evils of totalitarian communist regimes from the 20th century, imagining the constraints of living beneath the red shadows of a hammer and sickle, we should also visit the ramifications of the predatory capitalism taking over our world today.
Creating and trusting new education systems might seem like risky business, but with our current state of inadequacy in managing our region, how big of a gamble is it really?
The gamble isn’t in reimagining education – it’s in continuing to rely on systems that leave us unprepared for the world we live in. It’s time to rethink education, not as a factory line, but as a bridge to understanding and solving our world’s most pressing problems and preparing us for the challenges ahead.
