Dr. Nora Merhi, Educational Supervisor and Coordinator of Arabic Language, Lebanon 

 

Education is recognized as important by societies across the globe. It contributes to the students’ tutoring, development, and growth, as well as providing them with many skills, and helping them develop their own intellectual and communication abilities. It also guarantees them access to achieving their life’s goal. In the event of instability in the country, education is struck at the heart, and the children are deprived of their minimum rights. 

Conflicts and wars in Arab countries occur frequently, resulting in both human and material losses, as well as intellectual losses, which are manifested in students who lose their school years due to wars that hit their homelands. No child can study or learn in a war environment that drives them to flee from education, for fear of the cruel reality. The war may lead to the cancellation of the entire school year, which may result in students becoming uneducated, escaping from one place to another, facing displacement within the country, leaving their homeland, and migrating in order to seek security and peace. These harsh conditions cause children to be removed from teaching, making it out of reach for them. What are the suggested modalities for post-war? Is it possible to continue studying after the war as if nothing happened? Is it necessary to make extensive changes to both curriculum and psychological reality, in addition to compensation? What steps can we take to improve the psychological and educational situation of a child who has come out unscathed from the horrific war and compensate for the time he missed during the school year? 

A post-war examination of the educational landscape 

In the shadow of war and complex reality, it is not easy for those interested and involved in education to completely change the approved curriculum, but it is possible to work on changes that will help children who have dropped out of school, especially since their home countries have not made any effort to find special programs that take into account the losses caused by the war. The difficulty of a child acquiring education during the war is due to the challenging psychological reality they are experiencing, as well as the forced displacement they are subjected to, the demolition of their home, or other circumstances… It is a destructive factor against the achievement of childhood dreams and family goals for their child’s reputability. There are no special programs taught after the end of the war, whether in the mother tongue or in another foreign language, that each child is supposed to learn and maintain after security in homeland is established. 

The topic of education in Gaza, southern Lebanon, or any Arab country that has been impacted by war appears to have altered the equation of children’s academic reality. This situation makes us think of schools that have been destroyed and educational institutions that have been ravaged by aggression, rendering them inaccessible for children. Just two months after the last war on Gaza, we note the destruction of at least one hundred and seventy schools according to the latest report, “and according to United Nations figures, 352 school buildings had been damaged by mid-December; that is more than 70 per cent of the infrastructure in the sector “(Middle East, December 18, 2023). This is without regards to the sanctity of schools that have been transformed into shelters for the displaced. The same thing happened in southern Lebanon, where some schools in Tyre were converted into shelters for displaced southern Lebanese. Even though educational institutions are protected by international laws, the violent war has caused disruption to the educational process in these places. Today, we should contemplate the day after the war. Will it be like it was before? Without a doubt, it would be different. Reality forces us to reconsider the mental situation of children who emerge from war with difficult psychological symptoms, as some of them have lost their parents or relatives, or have lost most of their family members. How will the child’s psychological reality be affected after recurrent trauma? 

Resuming education after the war and its association with curriculum and psychological reality

The wars that hit the region force educators and those in the education’s sector to take critical decisions, with several attempts that contribute working on utterly changing the curriculums that was recommended before the war, in order to adapt to the psychological reality. We must work to eliminate the difficult ideas that children encounter, whether in Gaza, Lebanon, or Syria, where they witnessed the scourge of war with their own eyes, a thing that profoundly affect them. To help them survive these effects, we should remove their physical discomfort and restore reassurance and peace to their mental state. Awad (2023), an expert in positive psychology, posted a difficult tweet: 

” Children of war are sensitive and hurt, so we have to address their emotions, not just provide them with tangible reassurance”. This prompts us to work on modifying the curriculums to become more realistic and relevant to life’s realities, by adjusting a part of them in order to keep up with the emerging occurrences. Curriculums adopted in any war-prone State are supposed to be modified to adapt to the evolving situation, as readable and audible texts must be linked to society, environment and life. And the resources to focus on are listening, talking, reading and writing, which any child could acquire if he or she felt that the material studied was related to their status-quo. 

In addition, the local community should collaborate with pedagogy stakeholders to incorporate technology into the curriculums’ content, allowing children to pursue distance studies, even if their schools were destroyed by war. This prompts those of us who are interested in the educational actuality, to seek help from humanitarian organizations, in order to provide these children with smartphones or laptops, which will make their learning process smooth and easy without any consequences. The scholastic curriculums should be organized according to an integrating curriculum, focusing on the skills of thinking, planning, and problem solving. Materials with no added value that burdens the student should be eliminated, and the paths of their development should be determined. As previously mentioned, he or she must acquire language skills, particularly in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. 

Therefore, it is necessary to highlight the development of these qualifications by defining the criteria, the implementation and the conditions of their success. Some competencies require finding modern assessment methods based on the student’s experience, away from the traditional method of examination, memorizing, and recalling, Rather, by evaluating their cognitive performance and skills simultaneously, provided the test is not only a written one. To modify the curriculum, those responsible must create the development plan, stages, modalities, and methods. The curriculum’s development may lead to the creation of new texts that are adapted to reality, enabling students to express themselves in both oral and written forms. The objective is not to memorize information, as much as it is to convey oral and written expressions in a clear language, whether in the mother tongue or in a second foreign language. 

Hence, development is based on considering the choice of content subjects, to achieve coherence and interconnectedness of the material, which makes things easy for the student. This implies finding strategies that suit each subject,  and identifying the activities that promote and enrich the educational material, like reading some stories that are relevant to reality and closely related to it, such as: “If I was a bird” and “The boys of the tunnel”… This requires providing the  means, and then training the teachers to achieve the objectives of the modified curriculum, by securing the necessary equipment, books and appropriate methods. 

General recommendations and proposals. 

It is good to stop overloading the curriculums and convert them to what is compatible with the living skills, so that the child can pursue his or her studies, while taking into account the difference between him and the other children who have lived a normal life. However, it is important to work on introducing into the modified curriculums, activities related to psychological reality, so that the works are compatible with each other, and issued at the same time. The student who lived through the war crisis should not lose any more time, because bringing him out of his state of psychological fatigue may go along with the resuming of his/her studies, in order to readapt with the current academic and educational situation. Because, attempting to treat him psychologically at home, without bringing him back to school, will have an adverse impact on him. Therefore, the children should be provided with activities that release the negative feelings, and help them overcome psychological pain through emotional discharge. This requires special sessions in which the child expresses himself using a variety of methods, such as deep breathing exercises, chanting memories, expressing feelings in writing or drawing, or in whatever way they prefer. Children forced by the war to drop out of school can also be remedied by intensive training courses and year-round classes, whether in summer or winter, to enable them to acquire key skills, as well as intensive foreign courses in which the child acquires another language different from the mother tongue. In addition, we can adopt home study plans, to keep up with the educational level as much as possible. And that is achieved by developing their linguistic and computational skills, and follow-up on recorded programs or websites that are concerned with the development of certain skills for those who were deprived from education, and later, they can start to choose a major that corresponds to their circumstances and enables them to prove themselves and makes their capabilities known. 

Thus, it can be said that most war victims are children. If they are destined to survive bombardment and destruction, then the academic bodies and institutions must work on special educational programs, with an intensive curriculum that makes up for the information they have missed. The idea of promoting self-learning and homeschooling cannot be neglected, so that the children would remain firmly connected to education and are reassured about their future. 

In addition to what has been said, children should be armed with true belief, by reading stories for them that would encourage this true faith, and working to consolidate the idea of accepting reality and adapting to what has happened to them, in an attempt to rework on a new reality based on challenging pain, in order to reach a psychologically secure life. There is no objection to having them watch human development films that aim to alleviate their pain and help them relate to things different from what they saw during the war. The space of expression is vast and it is an important turning point in their lives to express about everything that has dominated their thinking during the difficult period they have been through. Attention to psychological realities and addressing internal crises are undoubtedly a major influence before moving on to re-acquiring lost pedagogical concepts. Hamsa Younis, a family counselor and social worker, holds that “the horrific, murderous, and destructive scenes that the children of war are encountering since 2023, will have many negative psychological effects on them, both in the immediate and the long-term. Therefore, they need psychological rehabilitation sessions, to get them out of this war with minimal psychological damage. ” This may cause an additional educational burden, particularly since the curriculums have not considered this matter, and we are compelled to adjust and change the curriculums, as previously stated. 

In addition to the above, we should concentrate on reading stories that bring hope to young children, or focus on a certain value that helps alleviate their negative feelings, and then ask them to retell the story, identify the lesson learned, and focus on the dialogue, so that the child can express orally. UNICEF provided various advices on dealing with children living in war: 

• Discover what they know and feel. When a child feels comfortable, they talk freely. 

• Don’t underestimate children’s fears and don’t overlook them. 

• Encourage the child to draw and read stories. 

• Maintain a quiet and proportionate conversation based on the child’s age. 

• Do not over-share fears with the child. 

• Reassure the children. 

• Focus on stories that has a positive influence. 

• Remind children that there are people who work hard to stop conflicts and bring peace to the world. 

• Avoid talking about fearful subjects right before sending children to bed. 

UNICEF’s guidance is an important way to help alleviate difficult psychological realities. This has a positive impact on children who are required to attend psychological awareness sessions the day after the war, as it raises their morale and provides them with psychological peace, regardless of how simple or ordinary the carried-out activities are. 

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The most important question remains, how long will war continue to affect our children’s mental, educational and physical health? Why are humanitarian organizations not working to alleviate the impact of war on young children? They do not have weapons and do not know the meaning of war, and are entitled to play, learn and live in a safe environment. 

Today’s reality indicates a challenging period for people in general and for children in particular. And we are obligated to use all of our abilities to restore education to its prestigious status, and to guide the children to the right path, taking them out of the cycle of fear, terror, and grief that has beset them, in the hope that we will eliminate the consequences of the bad war on all humanity. 

 

This article was published in issue 16 of Manhajiyat magazine and was translated into English as part of a joint project with the Centre for  Lebanese Studies and (PROCOL). All rights reserved. Republishing or quoting the article is prohibited without citing the source or obtaining written permission.