Yassin Al-Atwani
Education as a concept occupies the interest of various researchers and scholars in the educational, social, and psychological sciences, and the reason for this interest is due to the relationship of education to the process of building a human being, and the manner in which this human being adapts to his environment. Education, in this sense, is the process of the individual’s gradual growth in body, mind, and morals. It includes a set of interrelated procedures that aim, as a result, to achieve educational, social, and economic goals and objectives. The educational policy of any society usually emerges from the philosophy of the era in which it lives, considering it part of the goals of this society.
It is an effective means and tool for achieving the goals of any society that seeks to reach advanced stages of development and progress.
Talking about the educational system in Iraq is a questionable talk, because this vital field is linked to intellectual and ideological influences, and some political trends, which aimed to dedicate the educational system in order to achieve specific goals, and this was at the expense of the scientific method and the objective presentation that must be available in Course of Study.
This matter reached its peak during recent decades, when the dictatorship was adopting a project aimed at ideologizing the educational system with all its pedagogical and educational trends and data.
This can be felt by browsing the school curricula, especially the humanitarian ones, in which the policy of Baathism and militarization had a clear and evident impact on the pages of those curricula, for all educational levels.
It is known that the matter of establishing school curricula, since the founding of the Iraqi state at the beginning of the twentieth century, did not happen randomly. Rather, the matter was intentional and planned, and the most important thing that can be observed in these curricula is that they did not take into account the state of cultural and social diversity with which society was known. Iraqi, which led to the absence of nationalism in those curricula. Sati’ al-Husri’s supervision of educational policy in Iraq, with the beginning of the royal era, had a clear impact on the educational system in general, due to his exaggerations in perpetuating the extremist nationalist tendency in a diverse, pluralistic society like the Iraqi society. Its impact later emerged at the expense of the nationalist tendency, which Iraq was He desperately needed it, with the beginning of the establishment of his modern state.
The problem is that this educational policy has not been addressed, nor has there been any change in it, as the processes of marginalization and exclusion of the most important and most segments of society continue. Thus, the imprints of intellectual and ideological distortions were clearly visible on the educational curricula in Iraq, from the time the first building blocks of these curricula were laid by Sati’ al-Husri, known for his intellectual orientations, until the collapse of
Dictatorship.
Those with these trends have found that the best way to spread their beliefs and the ideological concepts they believe in, regardless of the nature of these concepts, is the education sector, due to the specificity of its spread and its ramifications among the circles of society.
What is required and urgent at this stage, the importance and seriousness of which we agree, is a comprehensive and continuous review of the education system and its monitoring, and an attempt to have a profound positive influence on it, and to distance it from deviant intellectual and ideological influences, and that clear mechanisms and plans be put in place to revive this vital facility again, and most importantly It is hard and diligent work to implement these plans and provide all the requirements for their success.