What will we be looking at when, say, five years from now, a decade from now or, God forbid, more years from now, the conflict in Syria is over, the country’s totalitarian leader is gone, the barrel bombs cease to fall and three million children displaced by war return home, now as young adults — young adults who had been denied education in exile — to pick up where they had left off as guileless adolescents?
Do the math, and the answer is obvious: We will peer into the abyss, straight into the heart of darkness of a country bereft of social capital.
The price Syria has so far paid, with well over 250,000 men, women butchered, is heavy in and by itself, but it is paying a heavier price for what it has done to what we now call the “lost generation,” those Syrian kids who will have matured in exile with no access to schools, and will by the time they return home comprise a community of illiterates with no labor skills, little prepared for integration into modern society.
You and I have heard a lot, read a lot and talked a lot (and for those of us engaged in the journalistic enterprise, written a lot) about that lost generation, and how a majority of its members, children aged from 5 to 18, have been driven by destitution to abjure their right to schooling and join the work force. Yes, we have repeatedly heard, read, talked about, and been reminded of, these children’s plight as they labor under harsh and often hazardous conditions for pathetically meager wages — so much so that we have ceased to turn away in nauseated disbelief. The aberrant had become normal, the beastly human.
Earlier this week, another reminder jolted my conscience, except this time I did not turn away, I flinched, both at the gut-wrenching aspect of it, and at its implications for the future of Syria, as I came across an article last Sunday by Ceylan Yeginsu, the New York Times correspondent in Istanbul, from which — and bear with me here — I quote at length.
“When he was 9, Ahmed Suleiman watched his father die from a battlefield wound in Syria,” the lead sentence in the piece began. “Four years later, he now puts in 12-hour shifts in a damp and squalid textile factory in Istanbul as the primary breadwinner for his family, which fled to Turkey after his father’s death.
“Over one million Syrian children live in Turkey, and thousands of them, like Ahmad, are in sweatshops, factories or vegetable fields instead of in a classroom, members of a lost generation who have been robbed of their youth by war. Like many others in his situation, while he toils for his family, Ahmad is paying a steep price. ‘I want to send Ahmad to school because he doesn’t know how to read and write and can’t understand the bus signs,” said his mother, Zeinab Suleiman, 33. ‘But I have no choice. He has to work to survive.’”
Before the conflict erupted in Syria, before the quarter million deaths, before the refugee exodus by several million others to the surrounding countries and beyond, before the barrel bombs and the poison gas, reportedly 99 percent of Syrian children were enrolled in primary schools and 82 percent in secondary schools. Today, according to UNICEF, 3 million children (400,000 in Turkey alone) are out of school, forced by poverty, like Ahmad Suleiman, to work, their right to the learning experience denied.
Needless to say, child labor takes its toll on children, in stunted growth, in intellectual and physical development, in chronic lung disease, in ruined eyesight, and the rest of it. But there are implications here that go beyond the price of servitude these children individually have to pay, that touch on no less than the future of Syria itself.
Sooner or later these children will return to their country, as young adults. So of what value will their contribution be, collectively, to society? The answer: That contribution will be minimal. It is axiomatic, and not just among sociologists, that education teaches kids skills that prepare them for a healthy integration into the adult world, and constitutes a major aspect of any modern polity, since if there is a deficit of educated people, as any World Bank and UNESCO report would attest, there will be a collateral deficit in the social, economic and cultural progress of a human community.
What social capital will Syria draw on several years from now, after the country has liberated itself from its current ruling brutes, to rebuild, to guard against the emergence of an ignorant nation unable to compete in the world, even to engage that world in a meaningful dialogue of cultures?
It is not just that I keep writing about this issue because my heart bleeds at its tragic dimensions, but I keep writing about it — harping on it — because I know that by not taking an interest in it, I would be giving my approval to the prevailing order. What we cannot do — but perhaps wish we could — is to explain to the 400,000 kids in Turkey, like Ahmed, along with countless others like him elsewhere, kids broken and body and spirit, is explain why we have failed to rescue them when they needed succor. A lost generation indeed!
Do the math, and the answer is obvious: We will peer into the abyss, straight into the heart of darkness of a country bereft of social capital.
The price Syria has so far paid, with well over 250,000 men, women butchered, is heavy in and by itself, but it is paying a heavier price for what it has done to what we now call the “lost generation,” those Syrian kids who will have matured in exile with no access to schools, and will by the time they return home comprise a community of illiterates with no labor skills, little prepared for integration into modern society.
You and I have heard a lot, read a lot and talked a lot (and for those of us engaged in the journalistic enterprise, written a lot) about that lost generation, and how a majority of its members, children aged from 5 to 18, have been driven by destitution to abjure their right to schooling and join the work force. Yes, we have repeatedly heard, read, talked about, and been reminded of, these children’s plight as they labor under harsh and often hazardous conditions for pathetically meager wages — so much so that we have ceased to turn away in nauseated disbelief. The aberrant had become normal, the beastly human.
Earlier this week, another reminder jolted my conscience, except this time I did not turn away, I flinched, both at the gut-wrenching aspect of it, and at its implications for the future of Syria, as I came across an article last Sunday by Ceylan Yeginsu, the New York Times correspondent in Istanbul, from which — and bear with me here — I quote at length.
“When he was 9, Ahmed Suleiman watched his father die from a battlefield wound in Syria,” the lead sentence in the piece began. “Four years later, he now puts in 12-hour shifts in a damp and squalid textile factory in Istanbul as the primary breadwinner for his family, which fled to Turkey after his father’s death.
“Over one million Syrian children live in Turkey, and thousands of them, like Ahmad, are in sweatshops, factories or vegetable fields instead of in a classroom, members of a lost generation who have been robbed of their youth by war. Like many others in his situation, while he toils for his family, Ahmad is paying a steep price. ‘I want to send Ahmad to school because he doesn’t know how to read and write and can’t understand the bus signs,” said his mother, Zeinab Suleiman, 33. ‘But I have no choice. He has to work to survive.’”
Before the conflict erupted in Syria, before the quarter million deaths, before the refugee exodus by several million others to the surrounding countries and beyond, before the barrel bombs and the poison gas, reportedly 99 percent of Syrian children were enrolled in primary schools and 82 percent in secondary schools. Today, according to UNICEF, 3 million children (400,000 in Turkey alone) are out of school, forced by poverty, like Ahmad Suleiman, to work, their right to the learning experience denied.
Needless to say, child labor takes its toll on children, in stunted growth, in intellectual and physical development, in chronic lung disease, in ruined eyesight, and the rest of it. But there are implications here that go beyond the price of servitude these children individually have to pay, that touch on no less than the future of Syria itself.
Sooner or later these children will return to their country, as young adults. So of what value will their contribution be, collectively, to society? The answer: That contribution will be minimal. It is axiomatic, and not just among sociologists, that education teaches kids skills that prepare them for a healthy integration into the adult world, and constitutes a major aspect of any modern polity, since if there is a deficit of educated people, as any World Bank and UNESCO report would attest, there will be a collateral deficit in the social, economic and cultural progress of a human community.
What social capital will Syria draw on several years from now, after the country has liberated itself from its current ruling brutes, to rebuild, to guard against the emergence of an ignorant nation unable to compete in the world, even to engage that world in a meaningful dialogue of cultures?
It is not just that I keep writing about this issue because my heart bleeds at its tragic dimensions, but I keep writing about it — harping on it — because I know that by not taking an interest in it, I would be giving my approval to the prevailing order. What we cannot do — but perhaps wish we could — is to explain to the 400,000 kids in Turkey, like Ahmed, along with countless others like him elsewhere, kids broken and body and spirit, is explain why we have failed to rescue them when they needed succor. A lost generation indeed!
