In a Changed Libya, Schools Face New Challenges - NYTimes.com
“"Back to School in Libya, and Struggling to Adjust" NY Times http://t.co/4pw25iAn ”
TRIPOLI, Libya — The classrooms at the Dawn of Freedom middle school were empty. Teachers shuffled around aimlessly outside or gossiped in the halls. A small group of bored teenagers sat in the theater and hatched a plan to coax their classmates back.
Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Children attended an informal class in the Abu Salim neighborhood of Tripoli, Libya, on Tuesday. More Photos »
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Photos: Battle for LibyaRelated
Libyan Rebels Clarify Steps to New Rule (October 4, 2011)
Times Topic: Libya — Revolution (2011)
Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Books from the old curriculum were stacked up in an unused laboratory at another school. More Photos »
The revolution was the problem, they figured. Just weeks after the liberation of Tripoli, their neighborhood, Abu Salim, remained a bastion of support for Libya’s deposed leader, Col.Muammar el-Qaddafi. The loyalists’ children — including teenagers who were recruited or had volunteered for military service — had little interest in learning the history of the uprising or the new national anthem, their friends said
The solution was fliers, said Osama Mohamed, a 15-year-old who wore a brown blazer and led the teenage committee. “They will say: ‘To the children of Libya. Please come back to school. We want to move Libya forward.’ ”
As the country totters on the precipice of change, Libya’s challenges were starkly apparent in Tripoli’s schools, particularly here in Abu Salim. In recent weeks, educators, filled with a new school year’s customary hope and dread, opened their doors to a confusing new reality. To undo the colonel’s rigid, dogmatic curriculum, the teachers were guided only by a thin pamphlet of instructions given to them by officials of the temporary government.
Neighborhoods like Abu Salim, where the civil war’s wounds are still raw, faced the stiffest test. Last week, the neighborhood’s divisions weighed on the few students who returned to newly reopened schools and their teachers, on the lookout for looming social problems even as they focused on urgent everyday needs.
Teachers, regardless of their sympathies, were asked to brush white paint over the former government’s propaganda. Counselors whose only role had been to take attendance prepared themselves to deal with young fighters returning from the front. School principals devised ways to repair walls pierced by artillery shells.
And they threw up their hands at the Qaddafi-era etchings inscribed by students in dozens of desks: “God and Muammar and Libya and that’s all,” read one, the most popular slogan of the colonel’s supporters. “Down, down Sarkozy,” written on one desk, signaled a student’s opposition to the rebels’ foreign backers.
The adjustment was easier in other parts of town, like Tajoura, which was solidly anti-Qaddafi. Students in those areas returned to school in greater numbers. But Abu Salim was the scene of fierce fighting during the battle for Tripoli, and school administrators say parents might simply be scared to let their children leave the house.
In addition, schools in Tripoli are focusing until January on reviewing existing lessons, not new curriculums, to allow schools in other parts of the country that closed during the war to catch up.
On the first day of school on Saturday, according to the principal, Mohammed Melek, more than 100 students came to the Anniversary of the Revenge High School, the name recognizing Colonel Qaddafi’s expulsion of Italians in 1970. Shards of glass from windows shattered by a NATO bombing littered a classroom floor. A green flag sitting on a teacher’s desk had not been removed.
“We’re trying to do our jobs as if things are normal,” Mr. Melek said.
He said that teachers were preparing a curriculum that would include instruction on a new constitution, the fall of the previous government and lessons designed to “raise the morale of students.”
“We need to plant in them the love of the country, the spirit of reconciliation and forgetting the past,” Mr. Melek said.
But a student, Mahmoud Najem, 17, contradicted Mr. Melek, saying only a handful of students had actually shown up. “I think most of the boys want Qaddafi,” he said, talking about an impoverished neighborhood where the old government had tried to buy loyalty with cars and cash gifts. That largess, however, was not extended to schools like this one, with a shabby playground and broken desks.
