Syria EDUCATION
A University of Damascus building on the old campus
Courtesy Susan Carter
A technical training school laboratory
Courtesy Embassy of Syria
Since 1967 all Syrian schools, colleges, and universities
have been under close government supervision. The Ministry of
Education and the Ministry of Higher Education are primarily
responsible for all aspects of administration, including
curricula development.
Schooling is divided into 6 years of compulsory primary
education, 3 years of lower secondary education, and 3 years of
upper secondary education. General secondary education offers
academic courses and prepares students for university entrance;
the last 2 years of this stage are divided into literary and
scientific streams. Vocational secondary training offers courses
in industry, agriculture, commerce, and primary school-teacher
training. The usual entrance age for secondary schooling is 15
but is 14 for teacher training institutions. This system was
established in 1967, when the country signed the Arab Cultural
Unity Agreement with Jordan and Egypt, introducing a uniform
school ladder in the three countries and determining curricula
examination procedures and teacher training requirements for each
level.
In the mid-1980s, Syrian education policies reflected the
official intention of the Baath Party to use the schools to
indoctrinate the masses with its ideology and to make school
training responsive to the nation's manpower needs
(see Political Dynamics
, ch. 4 ). The Fourth Five-Year Development Plan (1976-
80) established a target of full enrollment of boys of primary
school age by 1980 and of girls by 1990. By the early 1980s,
Syria had achieved full primary school enrollment of males of the
relevant age; the comparable figure for females was about 85
percent. Enrollment in secondary school dropped to 67 percent for
boys, and 35 percent for girls, reflecting a high drop-out rate.
Enrollments in remote rural areas were frequently far below the
national average. In some villages of Dayr az Zawr Province, for
example, only about 8 percent of the girls attended primary
school, whereas in Damascus about 49 percent of the girls
completed the 6-year primary system.
The demand for education has increased sharply. Between 1970
and 1976, enrollment in the primary, lower secondary, and upper
secondary levels increased by 43 percent, 52 percent and 65
percent, respectively. During the same period, enrollments in the
various institutes of higher learning increased by over 66
percent. In 1984, 1 million boys and 818,000 girls attended
primary schools, which numbered 8,489. Nearly 1,600 secondary
schools enrolled over 700,000 pupils.
The Ministry of Higher Education in 1984 supervised four
universities, one each in Damascus, Aleppo, Latakia, and Homs.
The University of Damascus, founded in 1923, had faculties of
law, medicine, pharmacology, letters, dentistry, Islamic
jurisprudence, agriculture architecture, engineering, science,
fine arts, commerce, and education. The Higher Institute for
Social Work, established in 1962 to conduct research into social
and economic problems, also was affiliated with the university.
Syria's ruling Baath Party operated an institute of political
science at the university which conducted mandatory classes in
political orientation and current Syrian history. The University
of Aleppo, opened in 1958, had faculties of engineering and
sciences, agriculture, and literature. Tishrin University in
Latakia had a similar curriculum. Al Baath University in Homs,
opened in 1979, was Syria's only university with departments of
petroleum engineering and veterinary medicine.
In the 1980s, the Syrian government was attempting to expand
enrollment in its university faculties of science. In 1984,
Syrian universities graduated 948 medical doctors and 1,693
engineers. However, over 3,100 students graduated from the
faculties of arts and literature.
A second major thrust of Syrian educational planning was
eliminating illiteracy. In 1981, an estimated 2 million Syrians--
42 percent of the population over 12 years of age--were
illiterate. In accordance with the government's drive to
eliminate illiteracy by 1991, in 1984 approximately 57,000
Syrians attended literacy classes sponsored by the Ministry of
Education and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor.
Public demand for education has remained strong, reflecting
the importance of education as a channel of upward mobility. The
government has continued to expect the system to provide trained
citizens to meet the economic and political needs of the society.
In the mid-1980s, however, the educational system was still
inadequately funded, and, even within its funding restrictions,
was viewed by impartial observers as failing to achieve its
limited objectives and goals.
In the Syrian education system of the mid-1980s, the concept
of examining a "truth" in an effort to confirm or refute it was
largely unknown, and, in any event, was often viewed as an
unacceptable challenge to authority. If the teacher's
instructions and assertions are questioned and refuted, other
centers of authority--the family and the government--might then
be asked to submit their truths to objective examination and
testing. Because research possesses limited intrinsic value, the
inadequate research and laboratory facilities were infrequently
used.
In 1977 one observer stated that although the Syrian
government has been seeking to improve the situation, the task
was formidable because of the "many shortcomings and defects" in
the educational system and because the society and government
have been unable to agree on a modernizing, energizing social
role for the system. This assessment was largely valid in the
mid-1980s.
Data as of April 1987
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