Sunday, 05 June , 2005
Baghdad: Kassim used to teach geography in the morning and spend afternoons repairing shoes in the streets of the central Iraqi town of Azizyah. Those days are over.
Iraq's 300,000 teachers have seen vast changes since the regime of Saddam Hussein fell in April 2003, and Kassim can now feed his four children without having to cobble a living together.
From an average monthly salary of 10,000 dinars plus food subsidies, they can now earn 300,000-400,000.
The result, says 40-year-old English teacher Jawad Mizhr, is that they can now do their job.
Such is the difference that retired teachers want their old jobs back, if only for a year or two so they can qualify for vastly improved pensions.
Groups like the United Nations children's fund UNICEF and USAID are renewing infrastructure and training teachers to get the level of Iraqi education beyond where it was 25 years ago.
"Iraq's educational system used to be among the best in the region," the UN Development Program (UNDP) said in its 2004 survey of living conditions in Iraq.
But though deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein initially sought to eradicate illiteracy, the combined effects of wars and economic sanctions since 1980 took their toll on teachers and students alike.
In rural areas and among girls in particular, illiteracy is now widespread, but a 5.8-million-dollar USAID program is aimed at turning things around at 84 "model" primary and secondary schools across the country.
In-service training of 100,000 teachers and administrators will "promote child-centered teaching techniques, and introduce state-of-the-art instructional methods in science, math, English and social studies," a statement by the group said.
Computer and science labs are to be installed in many of the "model" schools -- not in the sense of being exceptional, but rather with the goal of setting a standard for future development.
The program has set a modest budget of 70,000 dollars per school to demonstrate what can be done and to encourage future donors to extend the program across Iraq.
From Azizyah, 70 kilometers (45 miles) south of Baghdad, Mizhr told AFP by phone that in the past, families felt school was not important because harsh economic conditions rendered future prospects bleak regardless of one's qualifications.
"Now many families are thinking about having their children continue their education because jobs are much more important."
Teachers are also more motivated. Those sent to neighboring Jordan for training to be shared with colleagues back home consistently spent evenings in optional workshops, a USAID program director said.
"It was the first time someone was investing in them," he told AFP. UNICEF is using a "double cascade" approach whereby 25 people selected by Iraq's ministry of education go through a six-week program before training 440 others who train still more in turn.
Its Accelerated Learning Program targets areas with the lowest enrollment rates and aims to provide out-of-school youth with the equivalent of six years of primary education in roughly half that time.
The goals are ambitious but program officials are aware of certain limits. One of the ministry's priorities was to create a curriculum that included Islamic studies, an area that USAID did not feel was appropriate for them to work on.
Help is available to reform what will be taught and how, but Iraqi officials are to take the lead in curriculum content.
Among the things that Mizhr said remained to be improved were practical issues such as who was posted where.
Within the ministry, the atmosphere is much better and teachers can now speak their minds, but there is a surplus of specialised teachers in areas like English and science in some schools and not enough in others, he said.
Some materials were also now out of date. "We're still using old textbooks, we've just removed the pictures of Saddam."
Sunday June 5, 04:00 PM
Australian Defence Minister Robert Hill says he will encourage China to join regional anti-terrorism efforts when he visits Beijing this week.
Citing Australia's growing cooperation with South-East Asia - such as in the ASEAN Regional Forum - Hill said China could be more involved in fighting terrorism.
"The real objective is therefore to encourage China's participation because we know that the only way to successfully combat terrorism is through cooperation," he told an Asian defence conference.
"China has significant resources that it can bring to bear," Hill said. "We need to convince them that we recognise those resources and that there is an important role that they can play.
"So that really is what I seek to do in my dialogue with the Chinese," he said.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry official at the conference said discussions with various countries were already under way.
"China firmly supports enhanced regional security cooperation," said Li Yang, a director at the ministry's Asia department. He said any suggestions China was reluctant to get involved in such cooperation were "not fair and not true".
Hill plans to visit Beijing this week, though details including exact dates haven't been released.
Philippine Defence Secretary Avelino Cruz, speaking on the same panel as Hill, said Manila already cooperates with Beijing in combating drug trafficking, so working together on anti-terror measures would be a natural next step.
Beijing already works with Central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan in combating terrorism and has held joint military exercises with close ally Pakistan in north-west China's majority-Muslim region of Xinjiang.
China is deeply suspicious of US-led efforts, said Chinese scholar Xiang Lanxin, a history and politics professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
It has "never subscribed to the American conception of a war on terror", he said.
China opposed the US-led war on Iraq.
Bump.