Old textbooks with pictures of Saddam Hussein are discarded as attempts to revise the curriculum continue.

British Liberal Henry Peter Brougham said in the 19th century, “Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave.” For decades, Saddam Hussein perverted this philosophy and exploited education as an instrument to maintain his government’s iron grip on power in Iraq. Now, in an attempt to revive Brougham’s pedagogical ideal, the United States hopes to make education the key to stable democratization in post-war Iraq.

The state of Iraq’s school system is a microcosm of the state of Iraqi society during and after the rule of Hussein. For decades, Iraqi schoolbooks were replete with references to Hussein and schoolteachers served as trumpeters of government propaganda. Now, after the US-led war in Iraq, the school system is in shambles with looted school buildings, underpaid (and often under qualified) teachers, and a deadened 30-year-old curriculum. The United States has already begun an effort to reform the education system by purging school texts of all Hussein and Baath party references and bringing education experts from US school systems to serve as advisers in Iraq. Nevertheless, just as Brougham distinguished between “leading” and “driving,” the United States must be vigilant in maintaining the distinction between liberation and occupation of Iraq’s educational institution.

If the United States sees Iraqi education as merely a means for “winning the heart” of the Iraqi people, any changes to the Iraqi school system are likely to be superficial—cleansing schools of Hussein’s domineering presence, renovating Iraqi school buildings, and Westernizing the Iraqi curriculum by incorporating democratic values. The stabilization of Iraqi society hinges on the fundamental restructuring and improvement of its education system. Before pursuing democratization, the United States should focus on securing the stability of Iraqi schools as a means of empowering the Iraqi people with the capacity to recreate their own society.

Emerging from a Troubled Past

When Hussein and the Baath party rose to power in the 1970s, the Iraqi education system became one of indoctrination. The clearest proof, by far, is found in the textbooks written during the period. According to a report by USA Today on October 2, 2003, a fifth grade Iraqi history textbook describes the 1991 Gulf War as “the Mother of all Battles launched by American and Zionist aggression and 30 nations.” In mathematics during Hussein’s rule, students learned multiplication tables by calculating the casualty count of shooting down four planes with three US pilots in each plane. Students were required to respond to the entrance of an adult in the classroom with “Long live the leader, Saddam Hussein,” and began their school day by chanting against the United States for killing Iraqi children and burning Iraqi trees. In physical education classes, students exercised while reciting, “Bush, Bush, listen clearly: We all love Saddam.” During flag-raising ceremonies, a teacher fired a round of blanks from an AK-47 rifle to the Hussein chants of students. According to a New York Times article on October 1, 2003, an elementary school teacher at the Tigris School for Girls in Baghdad said of Hussein, “We had to include him in every lesson plan or we’d be in trouble with the Baath Party.”

After the US-led war in Iraq ousted Hussein, the United States honed in on the domineering presence of Hussein in Iraqi education and rushed to give the schools a “facelift” before four million Iraqi children returned to school in October 2003. The Governing Council, which consists of 25 members appointed by the United States, decreed a purge of all references to Hussein from the education system. Under a project funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Iraqi officials and teachers tore out images of the former Iraqi ruler and crossed out references to him and the Baath party in millions of textbooks. Iraq and neighboring countries printed millions of newly edited books. The United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) also produced new math and science texts with blank pages substituting for references to Hussein. Physical improvements accompanied the cleansing of the curriculum. The US military and Iraqis repaired and restored school buildings severely damaged by years of neglect, by the US-led war, and by postwar looters. The US-led interim government boasts of progress in more than 1,000 of Iraq’s 13,000 schools.

Challenges Ahead

In the same way that many Iraqis initially reacted to the US toppling of Hussein by destroying Hussein images and monuments or by celebrating the US military’s removal of his tributes, some Iraqi children and teachers cheered the purge of Hussein’s presence from the schools. Some students tore out pictures of Hussein and threw their books out the window, and teachers expressed relief that they would no longer have to tailor their teaching to government propaganda. For others, however, the process of discarding old practices and adjusting to change proved difficult. Some students, for example, have held on to the old habit of chanting Hussein sayings, and many teachers have been unsure about how to shape the curriculum when the only teaching system they know is the vestige of Hussein’s rule. If the state of Iraqi society is any indication, the removal of Hussein’s images, censorship of references to Hussein from school texts, and new coatings of paint will not be enough to improve the education system.

Just as the infrastructure of Iraqi society, which had been on shaky foundations even before Hussein’s fall, collapsed with the US occupation, so may the structure and foundations of the Iraqi school system. Since Iraqi schools reflect an Iraqi society struggling with the aftermath of war, the transition from dictatorship to self-government, and between seeing the US presence as “liberation” or “occupation,” the US project on Iraqi education cannot be purely symbolic. Reform must also focus on long-term problems: securing the safety and stability of schools, restructuring the school system, reforming the process of training and hiring teachers, increasing parental involvement, reducing overcrowding, and shifting the curriculum from one of memorization and regurgitation to one of analytic and creative thinking.

Over the summer of 2004, the White House assembled a team of educators, most notably acting director of the Ministry of Education’s curriculum department, Abdul-Zahra Abbas, who went to Baghdad to advise Iraqis on the rebuilding of their school system. The prominent US representatives in the group included Texas Education Commissioner Jim Nelson, Leslye Arsht, founder of StandardsWork, and Bill Evers, scholar of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. All have had strong experience with US education reform, but not with international work.