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Restructuring Education
By: Ahmed Chawsheen
Published date: 17/8/2003
Iraq is about to undergo a fundamental change in the system of governance which is long overdue. However, regime change is a necessary, but not necessarily a sufficient condition for democratic transformation.
Democratic transformation has its own preconditions. First and foremost is how the society contends with the concept of freedom.
For freedom to have any real meaning, the people individually and collectively ought to realize and believe that the other person could be right and that no individual or collective judgment should hang on the thin edges of black-and-white; rather there is a broad spectrum of shades and colors that lie in between. Therefore, no one person has the right to claim exclusivity.
Next, one should be guaranteed the right to express oneself without fear or repression of the consequences of that expression. One should be convinced that one has that inalienable right to exercise that very right. That right has to be well-entrenched and permanently fixed in people’s minds. This, however, presupposes awareness, access and understanding the laws of the land that must be respected and enforced universally. This, in turn, requires an acceptable degree of education –– formal or informal.
The education policy adopted by the society is of crucial importance. Democracy thrives in a society with open, free and liberal education from kindergarten all the way to post-graduate level. This entails an overall revision of the entire educational system in the country; encompassing physical environment, curricula, textbooks, personnel screening and selection and instructions guiding students, employees and faculty staff, principals, deans, chairpersons of departments, departmental managers, assistants to the presidents and presidents, delegation of authority and clarifying responsibility, revising wages and salary structures, financial disbursements and revamping the overall functioning organizations of the school system.
Physical environment: Protecting pupils and students from extreme temperatures by year-round ventilation. Children are quite unlikely to learn while shivering from cold or sweating from searing heat and sometimes heat and humidity. Proper lighting. Chairs with ample spacing. Blackboards, chalk and erasers of acceptable quality. Sporting facilities and playgrounds. Laboratories, audio-visual aids. Providing school buses for pupils and students of distant communities. Proper class rooms and administration buildings conducive for better performance. Well equipped and staffed libraries.
Staffing: Testing, screening and selection of teaching and faculty staff according to legal procedures written and any violator should be punished accordingly. Periodic follow-up of students and teaching staff with appropriate criteria and the concerned parties must be notified. A standard system of recognition for scholarly achievement or otherwise for inaction is needed. Educational institutions should not be forced to employ any graduating student or untested degree-holder by order from officials holding political positions. People, officials or otherwise, from higher positions should not meddle in granting academic title to any individual teaching staff without due process and without going through proper channels. Keeping and maintaining accurate records and statistics and ultimately storing them in computer discs. Teachers and faculty staff must be barred by law from allowing or encouraging pupils and students to learn by memorizing.
Admission Standards and procedures: There ought to be uniform and clearly established verbal and quantitative admission standards for undergraduate students and any expediency based on tribal, wealth, political affiliation and favoritism must be banned by law specifically enacted for admission purposes. Nation-wide relevant standard admission tests should be conducted and students’ admission to any major area of specialization must be based on the score achieved through this test together with school transcript. Strict guidelines should be defined for graduate students –– admission, examination and follow-up. Banning students from exploiting their union position or their political affiliation from resorting to carrot-and-stick tactics to extract grades from faculty staff who, in turn, must be held responsible should they succumb to any jaw-boning or arm-twisting practices. Abolishing non-failing academic year authorizations by higher- ups aimed at serving certain student cronies. Banning the granting of extra grade-point-average to any student for their or their parents involvement in political, military or militia activities.
Budgeting and dispensation: Annual budgets ought to be based on real needs starting from lowest sub-division and up based on the average expenditure of previous years, allowing some margin of flexibility for natural growth. Budgets prepared on the basis of expediency of a single person or two should not be considered. Transparency in procurement and expenditures should be established and verified by an independent auditing body.
Police and security: The sanctity of educational institutions should be respected and preserved. Outside police or security force must be banned from entering school campuses and premises. They should not be allowed to beat and torture students or employees. The collaborating school administrators must be punished by law.
Research and development: Premeditated impediment of independent research work, authorship of text books and translation should be punishable by law. Researchers of original ideas and achievements should be appropriately compensated.
General considerations: It is the responsibility of the educational institutions to utilize society’s investment in human resources productively and develop potential leadership qualities in students. The laws must be adhered to in terms of rightful academic ranking –– filling positions that are purely of academic nature, such as chairperson of an academic department, the dean, assistant dean, assistant president and president. Preventing academic departments with assistant instructors and non-PhD faculty staff to set up graduate, master and doctor of philosophy, programs. The students and their parents shall appreciate the value of the money involved in the cost of their education, their investment, from which they will try their best to get a proper return. The government should not shoulder the responsibility of financing the entire educational expenditure of the entire student body.
Ahmed Chawsheen is chairman of the economics department at the University of Salahuddin in Erbil.
Published date: 17/8/2003
Author: Ahmed Chawsheen
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