April 17, 2015
If there is one reason above others
that helps explain the many situations of armed conflict, political violence
and state collapse across the Arab world, it must be that tens of millions of
hopeless young men wander through their own societies like ghosts, unable to
enjoy either satisfying employment or meaningful citizenship. The supply of
young men, some as young as 14 years old, who are eager to join armed groups,
criminal cults, and extremist militias is staggering, as we witness in Iraq,
Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Libya and pockets of other countries across the region.
Among the main reasons for this sad
reality is that—since the 1970s when police state-minded families took control
of many of our governments—our Arab societies for the most part have failed to
establish a productive relationship between the education systems and the labor
markets. Millions of primary and secondary school-age youth have never entered
a school, and millions more are in danger of dropping out. They create the pool
of tens of millions of angry, fearful and mostly hopeless young Arabs who are
easy recruits for the radical and criminal movements—and also the corrupt
governance systems—that are the biggest threats to our countries these days.
These are homegrown threats, not invaders and colonizers from abroad.
A new report released this week by UNICEF
and UNESCO provides solid analysis of the magnitude and causes of this problem
of “out of school children” (OOSC). It shows that more than twenty-one million
children and young adolescents across the Arab world are either out of school
or at risk of dropping out. What makes this more troubling is that the number
of OOSC had decreased by 40 percent over the past decade, but now the fortunes
of our youngest citizens have started to decline. This is due to a combination
of reasons, including poverty, gender and other discrimination, poor quality
learning, social attitudes, early marriage, a lack of female teachers, and
conflict.
We know very well what will be the dark
fate of the 12.3 million children and young adolescents in our region who are
out of school, the over six million who are at risk of dropping out, and the
three million children who have stopped going to school in Syria and Iraq. The
overwhelming majority of this cohort of over twenty-one million boys and girls
will likely experience a life of poverty, vulnerability, marginalization, poor
health, degradation and pain, which is a sure recipe for permanent instability
and violence.
The report’s most frightening finding,
in my view, is that young adolescents drop out of school mainly because of poor
education standards and low quality school environments. The report does not go
into this issue in detail, but I learned about how badly Arab children perform
even when they do attend school, when a few months ago I researched a
presentation I made at an American university on the relationship between the
education and the Arab uprisings.
Available date from worldwide tests
that measure the numeracy and literacy abilities of students in primary and
secondary school show that about half of all school children in the Arab world
actually are not learning. Let me repeat that to confirm that this is not a
printing error: about half of all school children in the Arab world actually
are not learning.
A powerful report issued last year by
the Brookings Institution (“Arab Youth: missing educational foundations for a
productive life?”) analysed available global testing data from thirteen Arab
countries. It concluded: “We estimate, based on the average scores for literacy
and numeracy for the thirteen countries for which we have data, that 56 percent
of primary students and 48 percent of lower secondary school students are not learning.”
These are average figures. The results
for some countries are beyond belief, including from some of the wealthy
oil-producing states. The percentages of primary school students who did not
meet basic learning levels (average of numeracy and literacy) in 2011 was
around 90 percent in Yemen, 77 percent in Morocco, 69 percent in Kuwait and 63
percent in Tunisia. The best performers, with 30-40 percent of non-learning
students, were Bahrain, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, though in wealthy Qatar, for
example, over 53 percent of children at the lower secondary level were not
learning.
These are not just early warning signs
that our societies must take seriously to stop the hemorrhaging of our human
talent and potential. They are wildly flashing red lights telling us to stop
building one-way highways to hell for tens of millions of our children who are
denied the most important opportunity of their lives: to develop their maximum
intellectual and creative potential, so that they can participate as full
citizens in building stable and satisfying societies. If this does not happen,
these tens of millions of uneducated young Arabs will prove to be our own
homemade weapons of our own mass destruction.
Rami
G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily
Star. He was founding director and now
senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and
International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On Twitter:
@ramikhouri.
Copyright
©2015 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global