Integrating Syrian refugee students into Kurdistan schools threatens of drop-out
ERBIL, KRI (North Press) – Head of the Syrian Teachers’ Union in Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), Hassan Qassem, told North Press, on Wednesday, out of 40.000 Syrian students who are studying in the KRI, 50% of them will drop out if the integration project gets implemented.
Earlier, the United Nations and the KRI Ministry of Education discussed a project to integrate Syrian refugee students into the region’s official schools, which means that they will study in Sorani, a Kurdish dialect that is spoken in the KRI, instead of Arabic.
Qassem said that the implementation of the integration project will affect the teachers as well, “1.100 Syrian teachers will lose their job, because they do not master the Sorani dialect.”
Sorani is considered the official language in the KRI. It differs from the Kurdish spoken by the Kurds of Syria and Turkey.
Syrian teachers teach Syrian students their own curricula in Arabic within the schools of the refugee camps in the KRI, by.
Qassem described the lack of consultation with the Syrian educational institutions in the KRI including the Syrian Teachers’ Union or the Kurdish National Council, as “marginalizing the opinion.”
“The decision, if carried out, will apply to Syrian refugee students from the first to the fourth grade. Those students will move to the region’s [KRI] official schools and study Sorani curricula,” Qassem added.
“In case Syrian students decide to return to Syria, they will not benefit from their educational certificate, because the Syrian government does not fully recognize the Sorani’s curriculum,” Qassem noted.
He pointed out that the curricula of the Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria (AANES) differs from that of the Iraqi one in terms of the Kurdish language; in Iraq, Sorani dialect is taught, and it uses Arabic letters, while the dialect in Syria is Kurmanji and it is written in Latin.
Thus, the problem does not lie in teaching the Kurdish language, but rather in the situation of Syrians in the KRI, given that they are still asylum seekers, and they are not seen as refugees yet. Therefore, they are deprived of Iraqi citizenship and will return to Syria no matter how long it takes, according to the head of the Syrian Teachers’ Union.
Based on that, Qassem called on the KRI authorities to slow down in implementing the decision, hoping that teaching Syrians would continue with their current curriculum that has been applicable since 2014.
Since 2011, thousands of Syrian families have sought refuge in the KRI, where their children have faced educational difficulties, most notably the “lack of teachers, moving from Kurdish curricula to Arabic and vice versa”, until the situation stabilized after about four years, and the focus on teaching them in Arabic.
Qassem considered that the UN “let the refugees down” when it left the students to face their own destiny in June 2019, and stopped funding their education.
Syrian students in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) face a bureaucracy and heavy routine regarding the mechanism of bringing their identification papers from Syria to be able to complete their education in the KRI’s schools, according to a previous North Press report.