Students at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
KABUL, Jun 26 2013 (IPS)

Despite impressive advancements in enrolment rates, media reports of gas attacks on girls’ schools, shoddy books, and a lack of classroom facilities continue to mar the reputation of the education system in Afghanistan.

Many locals feel that landmark developments such as the enrolment of roughly eight million children – 37 percent of whom are girls – compared to the 900,000 exclusively male students enroled under the Taliban go largely unreported.

Other, less obvious changes, such as the gradual removal of references to war and violence from school textbooks, have also escaped media attention, said former human rights commissioner Nader Nadery.

Nadery, current chairman of the Free and Fair Elections Foundation, told IPS that between 1996 and 2001, boys-only schools functioning under the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan studied material that actively promoted violence.

In mathematics classes, for example, he said word problems included such scenarios as: “If you shoot a gun and the bullet travels at X speed towards a soldier standing 500 metres away, how long does it take to kill him?”

According to Nadery, tireless work by human rights bodies led to a revision of these texts between 2006 and 2007 to include, among other things, gender-sensitive references that replaced such passages as: “The boy was playing football while the girl was carrying water and washing dishes.”

Education Minister Spokesman Amanullah Eman told IPS that youth now learn about hitherto taboo subjects like tolerance and the dangers and diseases associated with drug-use.

English and computer skills are also taught in government–funded religious schools, which Eman says about two percent of children attend, including some 15,000 girls.

And whereas “religious instruction was given in Arabic under the previous regime, we have now translated all the books into the two national languages: Dari and Pashto,” he added.

The past few years have also seen rapid growth in the number of private institutes of both basic and higher education.

One of the best known is the Kardan Institute of Higher Education, which was founded in 2003 by four Afghans in “a single room when there were no other private institutions in the country,” said Hamid Saboory, a legal expert and consultant to the university.

This alternative to traditional institutions like Kabul University offered short courses in finance, management and business administration and is now one of the most highly respected of the “over 70 private institutions registered with the ministry,” he told IPS.

In rural areas, however, educational facilities and services can be difficult if not impossible to access. Some remote areas rely on lectures transmitted through TV to compensate for the lack of qualified vocational trainers, Nadery said.

Meanwhile, in the northeastern province of Kapisa, at Al-Biruni University, a number of girls in the law faculty complained to IPS of frequent power outages, and going days without running water in the dormitories.

Still, the presence of so many young women in the law faculty, hailing from such far-flung provinces as Farah in the west to Jowjzan in the north and in many cases coming with the blessings of their fathers, is an encouraging sign of slow but sure change.

Payvand Seyedali, former executive director of Aid Afghanistan for Education (AAE), echoed this observation, but stressed the need to change a law that bans anyone who is married from enroling in the public school system.

“This has serious implications,” she pointed out, “for girls who are married at 13,14, 15…who are essentially (forced) to drop out of school.”

However, AAE schools that cater specifically to this population found that many husbands, brothers and fathers were often the ones encouraging their female relatives to stay in school, “sometimes even making that a condition of the marriage,” she told IPS.

A researcher on ethnic bias in Afghan textbooks who asked not to be named sounded a word of caution about the complexities of creating an “inclusive” education system in a country of 35.2 million people, of whom 42 percent are thought to be Pashtun, 27 percent Tajik, nine percent Uzbek and nine percent Hazara.

He found that 100 percent of the references to people, groups or dynasties in eighth-grade textbooks are all Pashtun, a pattern that is repeated in other grades as well.

Other inconsistencies in the curriculum include gaping holes in national history. For instance, the last 40 years of the country’s history were left out of high school social science textbooks, a decision supposedly motivated by the desire to “promote national unity”, according to the government.

Asked about this move, Technical Education and Vocational Training (TVET) Deputy Minister Mohammad Asif Nang said that all parties to the bloodiest part of Afghan history could be impacted by mention of the 32 years of war.

“People from the Communist regime, from the Taliban regime, from the Mujahedeen” are still alive, and their children could end up fighting one another, he said.

The deputy minister stressed, “Every day we build five schools. Every day we have activities for teachers (to gain more skills).”

He lambasted an overly critical media that jumps on flaws in the system and exaggerates their impact.

What the country needs during this phase of state-building, he said, is more support, correction of mistakes and adjustments to and reform of the system, a process that risks being derailed by negative media.

Palestinian youth in the Old City of Jerusalem are taught a different version of historic events than their Israeli counterparts. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS

By Pierre Klochendler
JERUSALEM, Apr 12 2013 (IPS)

At Dar el-Eitam Islamic Orphanage, a secondary school under Waqf (Islamic trust) supervision located in Jerusalem’s walled Old City, Palestinian twelfth graders prepare their Tawjihi (A-Level) in history. On the wall behind the teacher are two portraits of “martyrs” killed during the Second Intifadah uprising (2000-2005).

Simultaneously, Israeli sixth graders from the Eshkol communal villages adjacent to the border with Gaza are in Tel Aviv on a tour of Independence Hall, a national shrine where, on May 14, 1948, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion read the declaration of independence of the state of Israel.

“The U.N. voted for the Partition Plan but because the Arabs didn’t accept it, the plan didn’t materialise and, the following day, the Independence War broke out,” declaims Israeli guide Lili Ben-Yehuda to the children.

Back in the Islamic school in Jerusalem, history teacher Iyad el-Malki tells his class, “The Jews wanted two states — the Palestinian state and the Israeli state. Didn’t they take over the West Bank twenty years later, in 1967, and settle on our land?” he asks his class rhetorically.

"Textbooks play a crucial role in educating children and forging their ideology as adults"
On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted in favour of the termination of the British Mandate of Palestine and for the partition of the land into two independent states – one Jewish, one Arab.

For Israelis, the vote portended the creation of their state six months later; for Palestinians it meant the “Nakba”, meaning catastrophe, when the Palestinians went from being a majority on their land to a minority in what would become Israel.

Observing how two classes – one Israeli, one Palestinian – are taught an elemental moment of their common history proves that “historical events, while not false or fabricated, are selectively presented to reinforce each community’s national narrative”, says a recently published study on Palestinian and Israeli textbooks.

Entitled “Victims of Our Own Narratives? Portrayal of the ‘other’ in Israeli and Palestinian schoolbooks”, the study found, “Both sides are locked into self-national narratives inherited from the conflict.”

“Each side negatively pigeonholes the other,” Sami Adwan, associate professor of education at Bethlehem University and co-author of the study, told IPS. “And both fail to include information about the other’s culture, religion, daily life.”

In the Oslo Accord (1993), both parties agreed to “recognise their mutual legitimate and political rights” and negotiate a two-state solution to their conflict. Yet almost twenty years on, mutual recognition – let alone a two-state solution – is not on the map, literally.

And it will continue to evade the map while textbooks, which “play a crucial role in educating children and forging their ideology as adults”, according to Adwan, do not acknowledge the existence of the “other”.

Analysing more than 3,000 texts in 94 Palestinian and 74 Israeli books over a period of three years (2009-2012), the study identified maps as vivid evidence of each side’s attempt to erase borders and, thus, historic claims.

“Children grow up on both sides with the representation that the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is really their homeland,” Daniel Bar-Tal, professor of research in child development and education at Tel Aviv University and the study’s co-author, told IPS.

And whereas schoolbooks “consistently describe the other community as acting to destroy or dominate its own community, it depicts its own actions as peaceful and acting in self-defence”, explains the study.

Educational systems on both sides are different.

In existence since 1948, the Israeli system is heterogeneous, comprised of secular and religious state schools, and of unaffiliated ultra-orthodox schools. All use different textbooks.

Created in the early 2000s, the nascent Palestinian system is more homogenous, with pupils learning the same textbooks.

For Adwan, textbooks reflect the reality experienced by both people: “Israelis see the Palestinians as only waiting for the opportunity to attack them. Still under occupation, Palestinians see their land being taken away from them,” he says.

The study also compared teachings referring to glorification of martyrdom and self-sacrifice.

Palestinian sixth graders can read in a language book, “Death before submission, forward!” — an injunction reminiscent, Israeli critics say, of past suicide bombings.

Israeli second graders, on the other hand, are taught the story of Joseph Trumpeldor, an early Zionist whose last words while defending a Jewish settlement against Arab attackers reportedly were: “It’s good to die for our country.”

Implications for peace-building

During the Oslo peace years, as Israelis and Palestinians were cautiously reaching out towards each other, Bar-Tal was in charge of preparing Israeli state textbooks for a new peace age.

For him, “The purpose of national narratives is first to mobilise people, prepare them to fight for the cause.”

But they can also, equally, be used to prepare people for peace.

In the 1990s, Israel started to come to terms with the issue of Palestinian refugees. For the first time, textbooks acknowledged that Palestinians did not choose to flee during Israel’s war of independence but were, in many instances, forced to do so.

In 2007, Yuli Tamir, a liberal education minister, introduced the term “Nakba”, which refers to the forced Palestinian exodus, into Israeli Arabic-language textbooks destined for Israeli pupils of Palestinian descent.

Two years later, the ‘N’ word was expunged; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then justified the decision by saying that the term was “propaganda against Israel”.

Against this backdrop, the study appears to have deep implications for peace-building, suggesting that the textbooks made up by adults are not yet engaged in preparing children for an ethos of peace.

As a result, the research report is emerging as a microcosm of the conflict and its divergent narratives, with Israeli government officials who have long criticised the content of Palestinian textbooks rejecting the study’s findings altogether.

“Our children are taught to love peace; theirs to hate us,” Yossi Kuperwasser, director-general of Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry and a former senior military intelligence officer who monitors Palestinian statements deemed “inflammatory” by Israel, tells IPS.

Even before the study’s publication last month, Israel’s Ministry of Education issued a pre-emptive statement dismissing the research as “biased, unprofessional and significantly lacking in objectivity” and the findings as “predetermined”.

“It’s not an academic study,” accuses Kuperwasser, “but rather, a political report used for besmirching Israel and its education system.”

The Palestinian Authority, on the other hand, has expressed “openness” to the findings, according to Adwan.

Though he would “like to see textbooks present the other side in a more human perspective” Adwan believes “daily reality must also reflect that move”.

Tens of Israeli children visit the shrine of statehood each day, re-enacting the historic moment of their state’s declaration of independence.

Meanwhile within the walls of the Old City where the Islamic orphanage and secondary school holds classes, Palestinian students sing their national anthem, most without much anticipation, as if statehood for them was a forlorn dream.

Afghan teachers and students are stuck with shoddy textbooks riddled with factual and typographical errors. Credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid

By Kreshma Fakhri
KABUL, Dec 11 2012 (IPS)

New textbooks, printed as part of an ambitious multi-million dollar exercise to reform the curriculum in Afghan public schools, have been found to contain glaring mistakes, adding yet another burden on a cash- and resource-strapped sector of this war-torn country.

The ministry of education forked out 91 million dollars for the printing of new textbooks as part of a planned massive overhaul of the public education system in Afghanistan. The authors were paid handsomely to ensure the books were of the highest quality.

Instead, teachers and students have been saddled with barely legible study guides and are struggling to make sense of textbooks that are riddled with both typographic and factual errors.

Civil society and some parliament members have placed the blame on “nonchalance and corruption in the ministry of education”. Unrepentant, the latter has assured the public the mistakes will be rectified.

Farooq Nekbin, a teacher in Habibia High School in the capital, Kabul, said there are “many scientific and factual mistakes” in the new textbooks. For instance, he pointed out that the invention of the microscope has been dated differently in the textbooks for 10^th, 11^th and 12^th-grade students.

A teacher of mathematics at the same school, who did not want to be identified, said, “The figure for the newton, the SI unit of force – shown on page 40 of the class 11 textbook – is completely wrong.”

Nadera Saeedi, head of the mathematics department at Rukhshana High School in Kabul, was of the opinion that the authors recruited to draft the new texts simply plagiarised the content, despite having been being sponsored by the Education Ministry to travel to Iran, Turkey and Jordan to study textbook writing.

“The text of the books has been copied from other countries’ books,” she said. “They are very difficult (to understand); nobody can solve the exercises.”

One of the physics teachers at Rukhshana high school said she found 15 mistakes in the first 15 pages of the new physics textbook for 11^th-grade students. Even the illustrations contained errors, she said.

Furthermore, the books have been organised illogically, with no concept of the education levels in Afghanistan.

Teachers are now struggling to make sense of the new curriculum.

This oversight could have particularly destructive consequences in Afghanistan, where the literacy rate was a miserable 30 percent in 2010.

As one of the world’s least developed countries (LDCs), Afghanistan has fought hard to make progress towards the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of providing universal access to education by 2015.

This latest holdup in the public education sector could set Afghanistan back several years in meeting the internationally determined target.

Official indifference

Though Education Ministry officials have not denied the problem outright, they have offered a different explanation for the mistakes.

According to Abdul Zaher Gulistani, director-general of curriculum development and compiling of textbooks, “We accept the existence of the mistakes but these mistakes cannot be used to question the content of the textbooks.”

His deputy director, Asadullah Muhaqiq, said the mistakes would be rectified in the next edition of the textbooks.

Sediq Patman, deputy minister for academic affairs at the Education Ministry, insisted there would have been no mistakes if the authors had approved the proofs. But this was not possible since “the books were not printed in our printing houses but outside the country”.

But Khalil Ahmad Shahed Zada, a member of parliament from the western Herat province and a member of the parliamentary cultural commission, blamed the shoddy production on the “nonchalance of the authorities”.

“If the mistakes happened during the printing it was because of lack of supervision,” he said, adding that Afghan schoolchildren should have got the best of books because “we (paid) the money to have the best”.

“Even the books that are available in the bazaar have so many mistakes.”

He joined others in lamenting the fact that neither the parliamentary commission nor local schoolteachers were consulted about the design, content or production of the new textbooks and curriculum.

The head of literature in one of Kabul’s most famous schools said the ministry of education only sought teachers’ views on the quality of the books after they had already been printed.

“They (the Education Ministry) should have invited experienced teachers to contribute before the curriculum was finalised,” he said. “What is the use of giving our views when everything is done?”

External specialists

The project for curriculum reform in Afghan schools began in 2002 and has since absorbed millions of dollars, including a tenth of UNICEF’s total budget for Afghanistan in the last three years, according to Aziz Froutan, a UNICEF spokesperson.

Officials in the Education Ministry and the Educational Curriculum Development Directorate said the costs kept mounting due to delays, the hiring of external specialists, and exorbitant production expenses.

Ministry officials said roughly 400 people have worked on curriculum development since the project’s inception. According to Gulistani, half of them were external advisors, mainly Afghans based abroad, whose wages were paid with assistance from the World Bank.

“Each advisor worked with us for one year, and left. Only 40 of them are still working with us,” he said.

Not unexpectedly there has been considerable dispute over the disparity of salaries between external experts and locals. Even Gul Ahmad Saghari, head author of the textbook project, has complaints.

He told Killid the Afghans based abroad “worked with us for exorbitant salaries … we worked for small salaries, sitting up all night to improve the books.”

And meanwhile, far away from the political wrangling, Afghan school children are muddling along as best they can with flawed textbooks.

*Kreshma Fakhri writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS.