What's a Lebanese?

The article below appeared recently in the New York Times and deals with the disparate national historical narratives that children in Lebanon are taught and its effect on national identity. These are issues I tackled in previous posts, but they have become even more relevant after last summer's war and its continuing political ramifications.

The Lebanese need a national dialogue to directly confront the demons of the civil war. They need a South African style truth and reconciliation that would finally bring closure to civil war. They also need to decide on a common national identity, one that weaves together the historical narratives of the individual communities. Without that any short term political fix is destined to fail.

A Nation With a Long Memory, but a Truncated History

By HASSAN M. FATTAH
New York Time: January 10, 2007

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Jan. 9 — History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.In Lebanon, textbooks generally avoid mention of such leaders, and of events since the early 1970s, especially the country’s long civil war. It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here — history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon’s heyday. With sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have their own agendas.

“America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity,” said Nemer Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum. “From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a citizen. And what’s worse is that the people who are encouraging this are the intellectuals themselves.”

Students are frustrated by the omissions, knowing they are getting a distorted view of the past. “We keep asking them when we’re going to learn the real history,” said Fatima Taha, a ninth grader at Hara International College, a secondary school in Beirut’s southern suburbs. “The history just suddenly stops.”

Private schools, which educate about half the country’s one million or so students, teach history based on books of their choosing, but approved by the Ministry of Education; public schools teach about two hours per week of history, based on textbooks virtually unchanged since they were written in the 1960s and 1970s.

In one textbook, the students get to know the Ottomans as occupiers; in another, they read about them as administrators. In some, they study the French as colonialists; in others, they study them as a examples to emulate.

In some Christian schools, history starts with the ancient Phoenicians, whom many Christians believe are their original ancestors, and the dawn of Christianity. In many Muslim schools, the Phoenicians are glossed over and emphasis is placed on Arab history and the arrival of Islam.

Whether Lebanon was occupied by the Ottomans, subjugated by the Ottomans or was simply a principality of the Ottoman Empire depends on the sect and region, much like whether the French, who oversaw the country until the 1950s, are depicted as colonialists, administrators or models of emulation.

“If they would just give us a national history, this country’s entire outlook would change,” said Jawad al Haj, Hara’s principal. Mr. Haj, who says two of his students were killed while fighting Israel last summer, has banned his students from attending protests in Beirut, fearing they could be indoctrinated by various political parties.

He has also prohibited any talk of politics inside his school, and is especially strict on any hint of sectarianism. About half of his 1,500 students are Shiites and the rest are mainly Sunnis, along with a few Christians.

“The kids need realities, a history they can believe in,” he said. “Otherwise, they will never learn the meaning of citizenship.”

Under the 1989 Taif accords that ended the civil war, Lebanon was supposed to unify its history and civics curriculums with the hope of building a national consensus and a more solid national identity.

Nearly two decades later, however, the history and civics curriculums are the only subjects that have not been revamped, still seen as the third rail of Lebanese politics. Beginning in 1997, a committee put together by the Ministry of Education spent three tumultuous and argumentative years trying to arrive at a common history curriculum.

In 2000, it released guidelines for a new curriculum that sought to depoliticize the history, several committee members said, focusing on the effects of scientific and economic development on the country, with lessons in sociology and economics in addition to teaching techniques of historical analysis.(Continued Here)