Libye: retour à l'école!

Un des nombreux défis à relever pour ce pays encore marqué par les affrontements.

"The classrooms at the Dawn of Freedom middle school were empty. Teachers shuffled around aimlessly outside or gossiped in the halls. A small group of bored teenagers sat in the theater and hatched a plan to coax their classmates back.

The revolution was the problem, they figured. Just weeks after the liberation of Tripoli, their neighborhood, Abu Salim, remained a bastion of support for Libya’s deposed leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. The loyalists’ children — including teenagers who were recruited or had volunteered for military service — had little interest in learning the history of the uprising or the new national anthem, their friends said

The solution was fliers, said Osama Mohamed, a 15-year-old who wore a brown blazer and led the teenage committee. “They will say: ‘To the children of Libya. Please come back to school. We want to move Libya forward.’ ”

As the country totters on the precipice of change, Libya’s challenges were starkly apparent in Tripoli’s schools, particularly here in Abu Salim. In recent weeks, educators, filled with a new school year’s customary hope and dread, opened their doors to a confusing new reality. To undo the colonel’s rigid, dogmatic curriculum, the teachers were guided only by a thin pamphlet of instructions given to them by officials of the temporary government.

Neighborhoods like Abu Salim, where the civil war’s wounds are still raw, faced the stiffest test. Last week, the neighborhood’s divisions weighed on the few students who returned to newly reopened schools and their teachers, on the lookout for looming social problems even as they focused on urgent everyday needs.

Teachers, regardless of their sympathies, were asked to brush white paint over the former government’s propaganda. Counselors whose only role had been to take attendance prepared themselves to deal with young fighters returning from the front. School principals devised ways to repair walls pierced by artillery shells.

And they threw up their hands at the Qaddafi-era etchings inscribed by students in dozens of desks: “God and Muammar and Libya and that’s all,” read one, the most popular slogan of the colonel’s supporters. “Down, down Sarkozy,” written on one desk, signaled a student’s opposition to the rebels’ foreign backers."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/world/africa/in-a-changed-libya-schools-face-new-challenges.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha22