I just spent three days in Stockholm with two students at the Sorbonne. They are Aya Hamadeh, a student in computer science, and Mortaza Behboudi, a student in international relations. Both are refugees, the victims of political violence. Mortaza is from Afghanistan and Aya from Syria. Meeting them is to bear witness to the power of the human spirit, to the beauty of human agency and resiliency, to the gift of hope in the face of adversity. Aya and Mortaza are students at the Sorbonne because a number of people understand their responsibility to assist those who have to leave home because the violence is such that they fear that life under such violence is worth less than the suffering and the pain of the journey to hope that refugees travel, so beautifully expressed in the poem Home by Warsan Shire: “No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark”.
Aya and Mortaza are not alone in their journey, they are two of 65,3 million people who have left their homes because of conflict and violence. Of those, at least six million should be in school, but more than half of them are not. For those in school, many receive an education that will not help them heal the wounds of conflict or empower them with the competencies that allow them to live fulfilling lives.
The reason Aya and Mortaza are thriving is because Sorbonne’s President George Haddad understands how education is the best way to break the cycle of violence. He calls Aya and Mortaza and other students like them: Messengers of Hope. For many of those 65 million people displaced by conflict, there is no George Haddad. On the contrary, too often there are those who close doors, who harass them, who humiliate them, who make them scapegoats for their own anxieties, who tell them to go home, to the very living hell that they are fleeing. In the vivid words of Warsan Shire’s poem:
“the go home blacks refugees dirty immigrants asylum seekers sucking our country dry niggers with their hands out they smell strange savage messed up their country and now they want to mess ours up how do the words the dirty looks roll off your backs maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off “
As they push them back to the violence they are fleeing, many explain this to themselves as following the rules, their leaders, or the ideologies that suggest some people, those who are like us, have superior rights to those who are different. What is that causes people like George Haddad to see themselves in the humanity of the refugees, to extend them a hand, while others push them away and add to their suffering is at the core of what I try to understand in my work in global citizenship education. We live times when we need to help more people develop the moral compass and the courage of George Haddad. With a group of colleagues, we have written Empowering Global Citizens, a K-12 global citizenship curriculum designed to help all students understand Human Rights, and our responsibilities to each other, and to this planet we share.
I met Aya and Mortaza at a conference convened by Education International, the International Federation of Teacher Unions. The conference brought together leaders of education unions, government officials, students who are refugees, teachers who are refugees and who teach refugees, academics and members of international development organizations. The goals of the conference were to take stock of the nature of the challenge, and to identify solutions and make commitments to create conditions to achieve the right to education for refugees. It is especially courageous of the leadership of Education International to have convened this conference at a time when the rise of xenophobic and intolerant views and their normalization around the world stimulate political and private actions that threaten the human rights of refugees. A new banality of evil adds to the suffering displaced people have experienced in the homes they have left in the form of the violence they continue to experience along their journey, as described by Shire:
“or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble than bone than your child body in pieces.”
It was a refugee, a victim of religious prosecution, Jan Amos Comenius, who laid the cornerstone of public education in proposing that education for all was essential to have Peace in the world. On this foundation were built public education systems, largely to advance democratic and peaceful coexistence, across all lines of difference. The global movement to advance education for all accelerated with the inclusion of education as a right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations at the end of world war two, as a moral compass that would guide human solidarity towards global peace and sustainability. A compass that would keep us from the banality of evil.
Given the origin of the idea of public education in the painful experience of a refugee, it is fitting that at a time when humanity confronts an unprecedented refugee crisis, the result of human violence to people and to the environment, we should honor Comenius memory focusing on how to educate the children of those who have lost their home out of necessity and suffering. That education is, after all, a right included in that moral compass devised to keep us from the banality of evil.
There is urgency in educating well refugee children and youth. 3.7 million refugees of primary and secondary school age have no school to go to. They are significantly less likely to be in school and to be learning in school than those who have not been displaced.
In six design workshops, the participants in the conference organized by Education International addressed some of the core questions and dilemmas in educating refugees. Those led to specific actionable steps which can now inform the development of specific national strategies and action plans. To illustrate how much knowledge those involved in the practice of refugee education have already, I mention here some of the actions identified by one of the two design workshops, which I had the pleasure to lead.
There is a need to support teachers of refugees in four interrelated ways: addressing teacher shortages, supporting effective teaching in refugee settings, providing effective professional development and support to teachers working with refugees, and providing refugees who are teachers work opportunities. These are tractable problems, and those in the workshops formulated concrete actions that could address them. The first decision to be considered is whether to integrate children in regular schools, as is done in Lebanon or Sweden, or in separate segregated facilities, as is done in Jordan. Teacher shortages can be addressed with multiple pathways into teaching, including opportunities for career switchers, with appropriate support so those entering the profession are adequately prepared; providing additional compensation to those teachers working with refugee students; providing extra support for students in high levels of need, and allowing temporary employment of volunteers and casual teachers.
The following options can support teaching in refugee centers: a supportive policy framework to accommodate voluntary teachers, contract teachers and casual teachers; develop participatory processes in the camps with the involvement of key stakeholders, including refugee students, parents, teachers and support staff to identify needs and develop a contextually relevant strategy which mobilizes existing assets in the camp; map existing resources in the camp which can support education of refugee children, including space, personnel, opportunities for community partnerships and that recognize and build the agency of refugees themselves and empowers them. Adopt an appreciative inquiry mindset, loot for things that are positive and good in the setting; develop multidisciplinary approaches to teaching that enable teachers to teach out of field and across the curriculum; review the curriculum so that it is contextually relevant, helps students develop skills that empower them in that setting and build the resiliency for their continued journey until resettlement. Develop competency based curriculum that builds competencies for conflict resolution and peace building, vocational and technical skills, music and sports, life skills, including those that allow students to heal from the trauma experienced in their journey. Plan for appropriate pedagogies to help students develop those skills in ways that empower them and build their character, emotional development and cognitive skills, for example, using project based learning, engaging in problem based pedagogy, entrepreneurship education, design thinking and other approaches to build the resiliency, creativity, leadership and entrepreneurial skills of students.
Effective professional development and support to teachers working with refugees should help them gain confidence and ability to teach in a multilingual and culturally diverse classroom, empathy with and high expectations for culturally and racially diverse students, capacity to foster the socio-emotional development of students who have been traumatized by conflict or by the experience of migration, versatility in the notions of inclusion and integration and the capacity to negotiate those goals with other key stakeholders and to translate those into effective curriculum and pedagogical practices.
Providing teachers who are themselves refugees with opportunities can be achieved having them teach in teams with host country teachers, providing them with mentorship and support, hire them as teacher assistants, who work under the supervision of a fully accredited teacher, creating bespoke programs, competency based, that allow multiple pathways to gaining and demonstrating the necessary skills.
At the conference there were many more actionable steps developed by the participants, and this makes now even more clear that there is a path to educating refugees, that there is much more we could do to support them effectively. This makes our collective moral failure to take action only more evident and the actions and inactions that close doors for refugees, who push them back, only more evil. In Warsan’s poetry:
“no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now i dont know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here”
The Genocide perpetrated against the Jewish people by the Nazis was an Evil resulting from another collective moral failure. It wasn’t just those who imprisoned and murdered over fifteen million people who perpetrated this crime, but those who collaborated with small actions, denouncing a neighbor, boicoting their business, questioning their loyalty, and the many more who ignored what was happening under their watch. After World War II, as people tried to make sense of that horror, it became evident that many explained their complicity in this atrocity saying they were just following rules, the law or their leaders. The normalization of these horrific practices caused many people to not think of what they were doing as evil. Most of them saw themselves as good people, law abiding, patriots. It was this banality of evil discussed by philosopher Hannah Arendt that allowed millions of ordinary people to be bystanders and enablers of the Holocaust that was as horrific, if not more, than the paradox that military commanders, some with multiple doctoral degrees, would plan and execute such monstruous plans of mass violence animated by a white supremacist and racist ideology that denied so many their humanity and led to the murder of 6 million Jews, 5 million non-Jewish Soviet civilians, 3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 1,9 million non-Jewish civilians, 312,000 Serb civilians, 250,000 people with disabilities, 200,000 Roma people, 1,900 Jehovah’s Witnesses and 70,000 criminal offenders, plus an undetermined number of German political opponents and homosexuals (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).
It was to prevent such banality of evil that Eleanor Roosevelt and others led the development of a compact that would remind us that all humans have basic rights, and that our obligations to those universal rights transcend the rules enacted by leaders, and that we should not allow their violations to be normalized, even if leaders or hate groups create rules that justify their violation. It is those Universal Human Rights that expose racist ideologies, including white supremacy, for what they are: sheer evil to justify the perpetration of violence. Refugees have human rights too, they are our brothers and sisters, members of our same species, denying them those rights would make us perpetrators of violence, complicit in this banality of evil. One of those rights is the right to education, and there is much we know should be done to advance that right. Not taking action on this knowledge is our own moral failure.
And so it is that the spirit of Jan Amos Comenius, that refugee who had the moral courage to call for Peace at a time of reckoning when violence had ravaged his life, and who had the vision to see education as a path from violence to Peace, moves us still today, four centuries later, at a time when our own violence displaces children and their families so we too can have the vision and the moral courage to do what we know, in our hearts and in our minds, is the right thing to do at this, our own time of reckoning.
