Education for European Kurds - a tough task

There's no shortage of fresh hormones in classroom four. A sound system blasts out music straight from America's grooviest recording studios. Boys and girls, in pairs, moonwalk their way past the teacherless white board. Others imitate the jabbing, stabbing arm movements of their favourite rap band. "We're practicing for a show we're putting on next week," 16-year-old Dashne, codename MC Soul, shouted above the din. "There's going to be traditional Kurdish dancing too." Welcome to Gasha school, Sulaymaniyah, in northern Iraq, opened a month back to cater to the children of Kurds returning home after years, even decades, spent in Europe. Welcome to serious culture shock. "I understand why my parents wanted to come back - here they are important people - but couldn't they have left me at home?" Shania Shoresh, 16, who's spent the last nine years in Earls Court, London, told IRIN. "There's nothing for teenagers to do here, especially since a girl gets called a whore if she goes out after dark." Her new best friend, Arez Awat, from Sweden, agreed. "The boys here are retarded," she said. "When they see you, you can see them going 'wow', like they want to eat you. And they think they have a right to grope you." No proponent of the traditional argument that Kurdish girls should ignore such behaviour, she added that she'd slapped a fair few men since coming to Iraq six months back. If Awat and her friends are horrified by Sulaymaniyah, Sulaymaniyah's teachers are no more horrified by Awat and her friends. After all, these are children who baulk at the rote-learning that is still a central part of Iraqi education. They don't see why they should stand up when the teacher asks them a question. And they swear. Enter Gasha school, the brain wave of the local NGO Kurdistan Save the Children (KSC), funded by the London-based Kurdistan Children's Fund. The idea evolved from an English-language school KSC set up three years ago. When returning Kurds began to send their children there last year, they coped fine with the English, not so well with the traditional teaching methods. "It was obvious a total change of mentality was needed," said Munira Omar Hassan, a former teacher who now runs Gasha for KSC. Finally opened on 31 October this year, the school now has 236 students and nine teachers. 141 primary school children come in the morning. Lessons for 95 secondary students begin after lunch. For the moment, teaching is largely limited to languages, with eight English lessons a week, plus three in Kurdish and three in Arabic. Teaching will be broadened to include all subjects by January, once a decision has been made about which curriculum to follow. "The worst option would be to translate the local curriculum into English and use that," Hassan told IRIN. "The best would be to link the school to the international baccalaureate system." That would depend on cooperation from the British Council, whose programmes in Iraq have so far been limited to Baghdad. With Gasha's current premises already seriously cramped, KSC is now negotiating with local authorities to begin building a larger school elsewhere in Sulaymaniyah. Eventually, it hopes, the children will have a full school day. Its involvement with returnees will extend until all present students have graduated. New schools on the same model will be the responsibility of the Kurdish authorities. "With thousands of families in Europe waiting to come back to Kurdistan, the ideal thing would be to change the curriculum in all schools here," said Karwan Ali, a senior field officer for KSC. "But that's impossible. Gasha is a compromise, and a blueprint for schools to convince those people back." "The difficulty with future planning is that you are extrapolating from the unknown," said Steve Harvey, a former British policeman in his second year of teaching in Sulaymaniyah. "The more successful this place is, the more people are likely to come back home." For the pumped up teenagers of classroom four, the future is a foreign country. Almost. "Gasha is my life," said Arez Awat. "It is the only place I can relax, and be with people I understand. Have you ever seen a school anywhere else where the students turn up two hours before classes start?" "It's a pity we only have three hours of school," agreed Shania Shoresh. She paused. "Gasha or no Gasha, though, I'm going straight back to London as soon as I'm 18."