Who fears the autonomous citizen?

In the first two parts of this series, we showed how education under the Assad regime was designed to narrow the mental horizons of young Syrians to fit the regime’s dogma, and how schools functioned as boot camps for life in Assadist Syria’s corrupt social order. Through their reach into everyday life, they reproduced authoritarianism at the micro level.

In post-Assad Syria, the transitional authorities have stripped away the outer varnish of Assadism from schools. As we have shown, however, authoritarian structures deeply institutionalised over decades - both within schools and across Syrian society - have a way of enduring. Schools are among the smallest everyday units through which the state becomes tangible. The degree to which the new authorities genuinely address these authoritarian structures is therefore one of the sharpest indicators both of the current state of Syria’s transition and of the kind of country they intend to build. The Syrian desire for change is real: in the June wave of Syria Poll, we asked whether Syrian schools should teach democratic values. A clear majority of 68 per cent supported the idea, while only 18 per cent opposed it.

An educational culture that strengthens students’ tolerance of ambiguity, their capacity for criticism and their ability to engage in reasoned disagreement is critical to the emergence of a generation of more autonomous citizens equipped with the tools for independent judgement. There is certainly an economic rationale that can be described in neoliberal terms. Syria needs human capital capable of driving the urgently needed modernisation of both the state and the economy. An education system built on humiliation and the rehearsal of dogma is poorly suited to preparing young Syrians to assess complex situations and develop innovative solutions. There is also a rationale rooted in reconciliation and broader post-conflict stabilisation. A more balanced engagement with history and politics would challenge the reductive patterns of victimhood, the resulting sense of entitlement to domination and the authoritarian temptations that continue to plague Syria. This is not to suggest that education alone can heal the wounds of war or overcome the intergenerational trauma it has produced. It can, however, help prevent that trauma from reproducing itself by exposing students to multiple perspectives and ways of interpreting conflict beyond sectarian and political one-sidedness.

Closely related to stabilisation and development is the reinvention of authority itself. The experience of Assadist rule makes clear that enforcing obedience and social advancement through violence did little to persuade people to participate willingly in the political order, accept its rules as legitimate, or build a socially, economically and politically sustainable country. In effect, the system carried its own expiration date, since school was one of the everyday institutional sites through which the Assad regime steadily discredited itself. Research in developmental psychology suggests that authority is durable when it is perceived as legitimate rather than merely coercive. “People are likely to accept authority when they feel they belong to a community that respects their dignity, applies rules equally and offers fair procedures for resolving disagreement,” a psychologist told Syria in Transition, stressing that the human drive for social belonging is a fundamentally positive resource.

Yet authority is not exercised by the state alone. “The flesh is yours, the bones are ours” was what many parents told teachers when handing over responsibility for disciplining their children. The phrase captures how coercion was delegated to schools as preparation for life under authoritarianism. This raises the broader question of how far political authoritarianism was reproduced through patriarchal social structures. Rethinking authority therefore concerns not only the state, but also the family. That can be a tough nut to crack. As one teacher told Syria in Transition: “Convincing fathers that the way they raise their children belongs to a different era is like trying to convince someone to fish in the Sinai desert.”

Neither families nor schools, however, can sustainably cultivate healthy authority if the wider political order rewards the opposite. Healthy authority can only emerge within a political order whose laws apply to everyone and whose rules can be shaped through transparent and participatory processes. Raising students who are prepared to demand, defend and practice those values would be a tremendous asset to state- and nation-building. If not, there is an inherent conflict of interest. A government unwilling to tolerate freedom of opinion, freedom of expression and genuine political participation has little incentive to educate generations of autonomous citizens capable of questioning authority.

The Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour, under Hind Kabawat, published Syria’s "National Early Childhood Development Strategy” together with UNICEF in May 2026. On paper, the document is ambitious. It states that education “plays a pivotal role in introducing individuals to their other rights” and is the “stage where children acquire the values and skills, and establish the standards that shape their personality and future identity.” It commits to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both grounded in liberal conceptions of individual rights. The UN Country Team in Syria told Syria in Transition that its work supports key competencies such as critical thinking and is guided by the “best interests of children.”

That all sounds reassuring, but scepticism is warranted. Across the world, authoritarian governments from China to Saudi Arabia have adopted education strategies aligned with UNICEF and UNESCO frameworks, including the Sustainable Development Goals, that emphasise critical thinking, creativity and human rights. In practice, however, critical thinking tends to be reduced to a cognitive skill that enables engineers to solve technical problems rather than a civic virtue that encourages citizens to question political authority or challenge official historical narratives. Authoritarian governments want human capital without human emancipation.

This pattern could well repeat itself in Syria. Official commitments to emancipatory education allow the government to appeal to the donors on whom it materially depends. They also help further normalise the new authorities internationally, while allowing UN agencies to secure funding and continue their competitive, prestigious and, ultimately, lucrative business models. Meanwhile, monitoring remains notoriously incomplete and accountability limited. Syria’s precarious situation also makes it easy to argue that the emancipatory dimensions of education simply require more time - and more funding - because the country is still recovering. The importance of those dimensions for a peaceful recovery and a sustainable future is evident. Yet it is equally understandable that, for everyone involved - from donors and implementing organisations to students and their parents - the immediate priority is simply to fill classrooms again, while the deeper questions of how, by whom and to what end children are educated are postponed. That priority, however, must not become a knockout argument against those who point to the profound social and political dimensions of education. The way the educational ecosystem is framed politically and managed technically tells a great deal about the power structures behind the institutions that will shape generation after generation of Syrians.

A cautious forecast would be that donors are likely to continue funding the sector with a primary focus on stabilisation, while avoiding political conflict over the nature of education itself - a subject the government in Damascus is likely to treat as one of national sovereignty. For most Syrians, meanwhile, simply getting children into school and enabling them to obtain a diploma will remain the understandable priority, regardless of the content – visible and hidden - of the curriculum.

A further challenge, crucially relevant for social stability, is posed by the trauma suffered by children during the civil war. Many Syrian children return to school after being exposed to violence, displacement, and years of interrupted learning. A teacher may encounter a child who has lost a father and spent years collecting scrap for money instead of carrying a school bag. Beyond better training and higher pay, the profession needs trauma-sensitive pedagogic skills. This does not mean turning teachers into therapists. It means equipping them to recognise distress, respond without retraumatising students, and help provide a social space in which a child can experience a few hours of stability, orientation and reliability. 

“What is crucial is that teachers recognise the different symptoms of post-traumatic stress and understand them as expressions of experiences that a child has been unable to process,” a trauma therapist told Syria in Transition. “At their core, these symptoms are a cry for help. Teachers need to understand that rather than simply trying to correct individual behaviours. Ideally, they can help children find words for what they have experienced. Movement and creative activities also provide forms of expression. This does not require elaborate therapeutic programmes and can begin with simple activities in the classroom.”

Beyond these immediate educational concerns, maintaining a “business as usual” approach will alienate those within revolutionary circles who, in the earliest phase of the uprising, regarded the freedom to learn, debate and think openly as one of the revolution’s central aspirations. Many practised that freedom in discussion circles before the war escalated and they were killed, displaced or forced into mere survival. It is also likely to alienate many Syrians in the diaspora, particularly in Europe, who have experienced different educational cultures and are unlikely to want anything less for their own children. History suggests that profound educational reform rarely comes from above. More often, it begins from below, in opposition to established authorities, as people create spaces in which different ways of learning and teaching can be practised - from Poland’s Flying University in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the American civil rights movement. In Syria, the rapidly expanding private school sector may become one such space. Although formally part of the education system, many private schools already cater to political and economic elites - including the children of ministers - and face growing demand from parents seeking more European-style education.

One can only hope, however, that Syria’s different currents, with their competing visions of educational reform, will eventually also be able to carry those debates into formal politics, organising in parties and contesting their ideas peacefully once Syria permits such political life to exist.