Background

Education is the foundation for renewal and positive transformation of society. To help realize peaceful, just, and sustainable societies, education must continuously adapt and engage new challenges and complexities. Education needs to transform for the better. Transforming education starts with a reaffirmation of education as a public good and the consequent requirement of guaranteeing the right to quality education for all. Transformation also includes protection of places of learning, and most importantly ensuring that education prepares learners not only for work, but strengthens solidarity, expands spaces for common human practices and experiences, and take the necessary action to achieve peaceful and sustainable societies. This call is urgent, especially for countries that have suffered from and remain fragile to the scourge of wars and ideological conflicts.
Decades of intractable conflicts capped by ISIS occupation of a swath of territory that included the historic city of Mosul have left Iraq stunted. These conflicts have significantly destroyed what used to be one of the best education systems in the region. Before 1990, Iraq had an almost 100% gross enrollment rate (even though GER is not a measure of education quality, it is an indicator). This decreased to 85% in 1988, then drastically declined thereafter. In 2002 the literacy rate, which was significantly higher in the decades before, was 45% and 71% respectively for females and males between the ages of 15-45. At the helm of ISIS, an estimated 3 million children were out of school in the 2015-16 school year and 1,050 schools across the country have been damaged during 2016-17. The out-of-school rate for girls is double that for boys for both the primary and lower secondary. Teachers, just like students, are struggling with the onslaught of challenges.
In addition to the physical destruction of schools, once sanctified places of learning and rapprochement; conflicts, especially ISIS, tried to destroy the whole system. Resistance notwithstanding, ISIS attempted, and succeeded for a short while, to remove history, literature, art,
and music from the forward-looking curriculum and replaced it with one that taught children to hate instead of love, how to make bombs instead of how to read and write, to seek uniformity instead of celebrating diversity, to use violence instead of dialogue, and isolationism instead of peaceful co-existence. For young girls and women, it was worse. Most were forced to stay at home, co-opted for the group’s ideological pursuits. Some were sexually assaulted, and others sold as slaves.
The consequences of conflict have been felt across all levels of education, from primary and secondary education, and in particular higher education. Besides the brain drain, Iraqi premier universities have been at the center of these decades of intractable conflicts. Most were used by various groups as operational bases. Along with forced closures, killing of faculty members and students; libraries, such as the Central Library of the University of Mosul were looted before they were obliterated. To this day, Iraq’s premier universities are still visibly scarred with bullet holes or rubble from mortar shells. Some, like the university of Mosul, have gone against all odds to reopen, but reopening is not enough. Restoring them to their previous status as centers of excellence for learning and peaceful co-existence is urgent. In 2022, Iraq is still facing difficult but surmountable challenges that continue to be compounded by resource constraints and other ongoing global challenges. Accordingly, the education system is sidelined, even sacrificed, for more ‘urgent’ issues. However, education is as urgent as security – it cannot wait. The future of Iraq is linked to the future of its educational system. Various measures are required to strengthen it such that it provides the necessary capabilities to achieve the goals of a society characterized by harmony and stability in its diversity of cultures. This is critical to ensuring that the country does not return to conflict in the future.