The miseducation of Lebanese youth

Source: NOW Lebanon
Author: Matt Nash
Date: 18th of April 2012

Lebanon’s public primary education system is in need of reform, and the problems that affect schools across the country are particularly apparent in the northernmost district of Akkar. A recent report on the youth of Akkar found that the neglected region has the highest illiteracy rate in Lebanon with a drop-out rate post-grade-four double that of the national average.

Since the end of the civil war, the government, international organizations like the World Bank as well as NGOs have been working to rebuild Lebanon’s shattered public education sector. Over 20 years after the conflict ended, there is much work that remains to be done.

First and foremost, the quality of teachers in the public education system and the way in which they are hired is problematic. According to a 2010 study by the Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEHE), teachers themselves are often not properly educated.

There were just under 286,000 students enrolled in public schools in 2008-2009, around 32 percent of the total student population, according to the ministry’s report. The ministry noted, however, that because of the low quality of education, more students were leaving public schools for private ones.

Citing “the absence of the necessary laws to ensure the recruitment of qualified teachers,” the study found that 54.5 percent of public school teachers do not have a university degree, compared with 41.3 percent who do. Further, only 4.2 percent of public school teachers have degrees tailored to the subjects they teach.   Another part of the reason is the high level of teachers hired as short-term contractors instead of full-time (or “tenured,” as the ministry’s report refers to them) educators. The study found that 29 percent of public school teachers are on contract. For years this system – which gives contract workers a fixed hourly wage but deprives them of full salaries and enrollment in the National Social Security Fund among other things, thus making them cheaper for the state to employ – has frustrated teachers who are not offered full-time employment.  

In fact, on Thursday contracted teachers staged strikes in both the northern city of Tripoli and the city of Hammana in the Metn district just north of the Beirut-Damascus highway to protest against their contracts. They are calling for “an open strike on May 2” if their demands are not met.

According to Samih Qolaimi, head of the Association of Primary and Secondary Public Education in the North, contract teachers are not tested properly to gauge their qualifications, nor do they regularly receive training. In fact, a 2009 reportas part of a loan to Lebanon from the European Commission noted “insufficient pedagogical support to the teachers and a shortage of inspectors and pedagogic advisers” as a constraint for public education.

On a nation-wide basis, there is a dearth of recent studies and statistics concerning public education in Lebanon, and the ministry did not respond to interview requests. 

Aicha Mouchref, from the Mada Association – an NGO that works in Akkar – told NOW Lebanon that teachers in the district have been receiving special training for the past two years, which is a step in the right direction to improve education there. Mouchref recently wrote a report that surveyed young people in the district to identify their needs and provides a roadmap for both the state and outside donors who want to invest in bettering the quality of life for youth in Akkar.

Qolaimi, however, said teacher training being offered currently is still not enough. Exacerbating the problem of unqualified teachers, both Qolaimi and Mouchref said, is the way the youngest students in the public education system advance from grade to grade.

From first to third grade, students automatically advance to the next level, whether or not they fully absorbed what they were taught during the school year. At the end of the fourth grade, students can only advance if they’ve passed all of their classes, which many do not.

“There were many cases where the student would fail more than once, and this is catastrophic, and this is common among boys in general, and so they either change schools or drop out,” Qolaimi said.

“This is not only specific to the North,” he added. “We suffer from it all over Lebanon.”

According to the 2009 European Commission report, “multiple repetitions, school retardation and dropout are indeed a major deficiency of the public educational system.”

Most recently, the ministry wrote a National Education Strategy in 2010, which calls for making education available equally across the country and beefing up the curriculum and quality of teaching staff to build a “knowledge society.” However, it is unclear how far the ministry has gone to implement this strategy.

Mouchref, from the NGO, also noted that all math and science classes in public schools are taught in French. However, she said many schools lack teachers well qualified to teach children to understand French, severely hindering them in class.

“It’s like you’re being taught science in Chinese,” she said.

Both Mouchref and Qolaimi said the state needs to work harder to put properly qualified teachers into the classroom. A good first step, which the ministry itself recognized in its 2010 report, would be to step up the ministry’s ability to actually monitor teachers’ performance.

Qolaimi said there is some monitoring taking place in the North, but that reviews focus mainly on administrative procedure instead of how an educator is teaching and whether or not he or she is using effective methods.

Better monitoring would also likely reduce another serious problem young people in Akkar reported: being beaten by their teachers. Mouchref said the youth Mada interviewed regularly reported both mental and physical abuse by teachers. Qolaimi agreed that abuse happens, but he brushed it off.

“It might happen,” he said, adding: “It is not really the end of the world, but in general this is not common anymore.”