War, state collapse, and the predicament of education in Iraq

Abstract

The venerable saying above has come to apply less in recent years, at least as far as Iraq is concerned. Iraqi writers have published a great deal of new work in the course of the country’s post-2003 dislocation; Iraqi textbooks have mostly been published in Jordan since the early 1990s;2 and Iraqi literacy rates have fallen to levels unseen since the 1960s. Today, the saying might run something like “Iraqis write, Jordanians publish, and no one can read.” Bush administration officials managing the 2003 US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq hoped to comprehensively remake the political, economic, cultural, and intellectual face of the country. Consistent with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s “creative chaos” doctrine,3 American officials first fostered the instant privatization of state assets by allowing mass looting, then enacted a series of reforms intended to reorient Iraq’s education system. Concentrating on such interventions as textbook reform, facility restoration, de-Ba‘thification, and bilateral university assistance, Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) officials had hoped to shepherd a new and more amenable Iraq out of the shell of the old. One of the more ambitious announced interventions of U.S. government officials in Iraq’s education system involved reforming all levels of curriculum to better coincide with “international standards,” – particularly through textbook revision. As it turns out, following the completion of the UNICEF/UNESCO textbook editing projects, Project RISE, and a series of higher education projects, the CPA educational legacy turned out to be remarkably modest.