Iraqi schools battered, but opening

Amer Abdul Hamid wipes his hands on his filthy overalls, steps back, and admires the brand new paint, glaring white in the afternoon sun, on the walls of the school that his work crew is remodeling.

"This place was a wreck when we arrived two weeks ago," he says proudly. "When the kids come back to school they will walk right past the front gate. They won't recognize it."

But as 7 million Iraqi children and students prepare to start a new school year Wednesday, their shattered education system needs more than a fresh coat of paint. In a top-to-bottom overhaul, teachers, government officials, and American advisers are racing to do everything from hammering together school desks and installing decent toilets to revising textbooks and exploring new methods of teaching.

"This is the beginning of a new era, with a new vision for education," said Education Minister Aladin Alwan, as he opened a teacher-training seminar last week. "We have to rebuild and reorient our education system."

Most of Iraq's schools and colleges have emerged from 13 years of international sanctions and a wave of postwar looting in pitiful shape, stripped of even the simplest teaching aids.

Two generations of underpaid, undermotivated teachers hemmed in by the former Baathist government's ideological restrictions have given their classes a "rigid, shallow, and passive" education, in the words of Leslye Arsht, a US adviser at the Ministry of Education.

The first task has been simply to get Iraq's schools and universities ready to receive students.

At the Al Rawabi school in the Al Mustansria district of Baghdad, where Mr. Hamid's 25-strong crew has been working 15 hours a day since the beginning of the month, that means giving the whole place a complete makeover.

"It hadn't been looted, but it was like all schools in Iraq," Hamid says. "The ceiling was leaking, all the tiles and windows were broken, some of the doors were missing. We've put in new plumbing, new toilets, rewired everywhere, laid new floors in the classrooms, and repainted. It makes me happy to do this kind of work for the kids' future." Shortages of time and money, though, have left most schools untouched.

Only about 1,000 of Iraq's 13,500 schools are getting this sort of treatment, and at Baghdad University, staff are paying from their own pockets to repair broken windows.

At the university's faculty of electrical engineering, the students' first assignment this week will be to clean up their labs and classrooms, coated with thick dust that has blown in through empty window frames, says Nehad al-Rawi, the faculty dean and university vice president.

"They are used to it," he adds. "They've already cleared up tons of broken glass."

Equipping the schools will take longer. As a first step the US Agency for International Development (USAID) is handing out to each of Iraq's 1.5 million secondary school children a blue canvas satchel filled with workbooks, pencils, ballpoint pens, an eraser, a ruler, a protractor and compasses, and a pocket calculator, all loudly emblazoned with the USAID logo.

The UN Children's Fund, UNICEF, is equipping primary schools with their basic needs. But universities, where scientific teaching equipment is more expensive, are still waiting for help.

At Baghdad's Al Mustansria University, for example, where much of the campus was looted and burned, the administration has found the money to replace only 200 of the 4,000 computers that were stolen.

"We are looking forward to the donors' conference in Madrid next month," when the United States is hoping to secure reconstruction pledges of $10 billion from foreign governments, says Mohammed al-Ani, the university's vice president.

Equipment is not the top priority, though, for Professor Rawi at Baghdad University, who is focusing his attention instead on arrangements at the main campus entrance.

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