The baccalaureate wars

The scenes of students returning from the great baccalaureate campaign — sleepless, dazed, perched on the frontiers of the future — brought back memories of an annual war. Social media filled, as it always does, with complaints about impossible questions. There is that famous clip of a student protesting: “They asked us about verses from outside the Qur’an,” by which he meant outside the syllabus.

We saw fainting, tears, fathers embracing their children as if they had returned from an epic expedition, and mothers waiting outside the examination halls to comfort the wounded and rally the fighters. In Egypt, a video circulated of parents beating up an exam supervisor because she had been too strict in preventing cheating. In countries such as China, ambulances and hospitals are put on alert near exam centres. There must be exams, it seems. And every exam must contain its allotted portion of earthly torment.

Britain has its own stern cousin of the Syrian baccalaureate: A-levels, focused on fewer subjects but in greater depth. Germany has the Abitur, a university entrance qualification based on school assessments and final exams over two years. The United States has no single national baccalaureate; admission depends on a student’s longer record, sometimes alongside tests such as the SAT or ACT.

In France, the secondary-school leaving exam is called the baccalauréat, a term said by the British Orientalist Alfred Guillaume to have Arabic roots, deriving from the phrase bi-haqq al-riwaya — “by right of transmission” — from the days when Andalusian universities were centres of world learning.

Crossing the baccalaureate strait resembles crossing the bridge of Sirat stretched above hell (and over which righteous can cross.) Information is memorised for the exam, and for the exam alone. Once the war is over, the gates of exam centres often turn into festivals for destroying books and papers in celebration. Syria replaced the old name “Ministry of Education” with “Ministry of Knowledge” half a century ago. Yet the evidence suggests that the education is thin, and the knowledge thinner.

To satirise Arab learning methods after decades of independence from colonialism is not to praise Western ones. We remain, in many ways, under cultural mandate: the defeated imitate the victorious. Western education has its own defects, but the progress of those countries suggests that their schools do something better. At the very least, they stuff their pupils with less.

There is no denying that our students study many things they do not need, then forget them immediately. The ladder of academic advancement in the Arab world often seems designed to produce ignorance: foreign-language teachers are elevated, medicine and engineering are made objects of worship, and both become graveyards for Arab minds. 

Our doctors and engineers may know their specialisms, but many are illiterate in the humanities. They may never have heard of Robinson Crusoe; but they can recite jokes from The School of Mischief by heart. That play, adapted from a Western original, announced the toppling of the battered throne of learning.

The Baathist socialist era began by encouraging education, and Syrians do love learning. That love has many roots: inheritance from ancient civilisations such as Ugarit and Ras Shamra, where writing was discovered; prophetic traditions praising the people of Syria as a refuge of knowledge. But the Baath adopted a policy of “absorption”: cramming thousands of students into rooms and halls that could not hold them, and imposing uniforms without proper sizes, forcing students to carry jackets that did not fit, like Sisyphus with his rock. 

Universities cannot absorb everyone, so selection becomes a kind of Darwinian struggle: survival of the most memorising. Memorisation is not evil in itself, but our schools mix the wheat with the chaff. The new Syrian government did well to abolish the old Nationalism subject textbook, but much work remains. First among its tasks is to make it easier for students to choose the faculty that suits their inclinations, rather than the one that best serves their wallet.

The foundations of good education are simple: train teachers, improve their pay, raise their status, and choose them properly. Not every university graduate is fit to teach. Food matters during long school days. So does play. Sport is a core subject in the West and a neglected luxury in the Arab world.

Then come jobs. Opportunities grow only when economies produce. Education follows the economy, especially in countries looted or ruined by war. The gap between graduates’ incomes must also be narrowed, so that faculties do not become castes, some born from the god’s head and others from his feet.

Finally, the baccalaureate should be spread across the secondary years, as in the West. Most important of all, its validity should be extended beyond a single year — unlike the electoral mandate of a president, which usually lasts forever.