Gaza: shares of rubble

Writer: Taghreed Ali

In Gaza, school is no longer a place where children go every morning, but rather a question about the future of a generation that spends its life outside the classroom. When a child drops out of education, he not only loses lessons that can be replaced, but also loses part of the time during which his abilities are formed, his options expand, and he begins to shape the features of his future. As the war continued, the danger was no longer limited to depriving children of school, but rather extended to the possibility that this deprivation would become part of their normal lives.

The effects of wars are not measured by the amount of destruction they leave behind alone, but rather by what societies are unable to recover after the bombing stops. Schools may be restored and books printed again, but restoring education does not only mean reopening the doors. It means saving a generation from losses that accumulate the longer they are cut off from knowledge.

The time a child spends away from school is not a neutral space, but rather a stage in which the gap between what he needs to learn and what he can achieve widens.

The tragedy in Gaza is that education no longer faces only the problem of a lack of seats and damaged buildings, but also the collapse of the environment that makes learning possible. School provides more than knowledge, because it gives the child daily regularity, space for interaction, and a feeling that he is living a life with a rhythm that goes beyond fear and displacement. When this environment disappears, education itself becomes vulnerable to erosion, even among children who find intermittent opportunities to continue their lessons.

In wars, it is possible to count damaged schools and estimate the costs of rebuilding them, but measuring educational loss is more complex. How can a child be compensated for having dropped out of school at an essential stage of his development? How can the gap be addressed between a student who found an opportunity to learn and another who spent years in displacement without a suitable place to study?

Children are not equal in their ability to overcome the crisis. Anyone who has a phone and an Internet connection, and someone to help him follow his lessons, has an opportunity that is not available to a child who lives in a crowded tent or is unable to provide his basic needs. Thus, war not only threatens children's right to education, but also redistributes their opportunities unfairly, such that the family's ability to provide the minimum level of stability becomes a factor influencing the future of its children.

This gap is embodied in the experience of my son, Omar, seven years old, who is studying in the second grade in one of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) schools. He is sitting on the ground, without a seat, inside a nylon tent, amid the rubble, while the school’s classrooms are crowded with displaced people who have lost their homes.

In this scene, the crisis does not appear merely to be a lack of equipment, but rather an imbalance in the basic conditions that are supposed to grant the child his right to education.

Omar is trying to continue his lessons in a place that lacks the most basic classroom requirements, while the school rooms have turned into a shelter for families searching for a roof to protect them from homelessness. This overlap cannot be viewed as a conflict between two rights, as the displaced did not choose to lose their homes, and the children did not choose to lose their educational environment.

What unites the housing tragedy and the educational crisis is the absence of adequate alternatives, when people are forced to use available spaces to meet urgent needs, at the expense of other, no less important needs.

This experience reveals a deeper aspect of the crisis: when sitting on the ground inside a tent becomes the alternative available to the child, the problem is not only related to a missing chair, but rather to the gap between the right to education and the actual ability to exercise it. A right that does not find an environment that protects it from interruption remains incomplete, no matter how present it remains in laws and charters.

The danger of dropping out of school does not stop at the lessons the student loses, but rather extends to his ability to continue his education in the future, as learning is a cumulative process, in which subsequent skills depend on what the child has previously acquired.

The longer the interruption, the greater the need to assess his level, address the gaps that have accumulated, and provide support to help him return to his educational path.

But the risk is not evenly distributed. Children who lack stable shelter, family support, and the tools to learn face additional barriers, and may find it more difficult to regain what they have lost. If returning to school is not accompanied by compensatory programs that take into account different levels of students, temporary gaps may turn into long-term disparities in achievement and opportunities.

Here comes one of the less obvious consequences of the war: its educational effects may not end when schools reopen, because not all children will return to the same starting point. Some of them will need a longer time to regain their skills, and some of them may face family and economic circumstances that hinder their continuation, while children with disabilities need arrangements to ensure their ability to access and participate in education.

If they were all treated as if they had gone through the same experience, the educational system might reproduce the disparities that the war deepened rather than reduce them.

The continuation of poverty and displacement may push some families to put their daily survival needs ahead of their children’s education, not because they lack interest in their future, but because current pressures are narrowing their options. This may lead to an increased risk of dropping out of education, especially when the interruption becomes long and the family's ability to bear the costs of education and its needs weakens. Therefore, protecting education cannot be separated from providing a minimum level of living stability for families.

The issue, then, is not only that a generation of children is losing educational information that can be recovered, but that the conditions of war may make learning opportunities after its end more deeply uneven. If these gaps are left unaddressed, their effects may persist into later stages of education, limiting the options available to children as they move into work and public life.

Priority to food, water, medicine, and shelter may seem self-evident in light of the humanitarian catastrophe, but placing education on the list of deferred needs assumes that children can suspend their development until appropriate conditions are available. The truth is that the childhood years pass regardless of the ability of institutions to respond, and that postponing education does not stop the loss, but rather adds to it.

This does not mean underestimating the importance of urgent needs, or making a comparison between the child’s right to food and his right to education. Rather, it means that the humanitarian response should view these rights as complementary. Shelter, which protects the family, and education, which gives the child the opportunity to continue, are not two competing paths, but rather two elements in protecting life and dignity.

Hence, it is not enough to measure progress by the number of schools reopened and classrooms that have been equipped. The true criterion is the ability of children to access regular education, regain the skills they lost, and continue studying without conditions of displacement and poverty permanently limiting their opportunities. This requires assessing student levels, launching remedial programs, supporting teachers, providing learning materials, and creating appropriate educational spaces, taking into account the needs of children with disabilities.

Likewise, schools that use shelters for families cannot be evacuated from their humanitarian function without providing safe alternatives for the displaced. The solution does not lie in holding families responsible for disrupting education, but rather in addressing the lack of shelter places, providing appropriate educational spaces, and preventing continued reliance on forced solutions that make basic rights hostage to one another.

Restoring education is not complete by simply providing a place to sit and a book to read. A child who has experienced bombing and displacement or lost a family member may need psychological and social support to help him focus and interact. Therefore, the success of any educational response must be measured by the actual ability it provides children to learn, not simply by their return to the space bearing the name of school.

The education crisis in Gaza confronts society with a question that goes beyond rebuilding buildings: Is it possible to talk about recovery while children remain outside the education process, or return to it with unaddressed gaps? Rebuilding the quarantine is necessary, but it is not sufficient if it is not accompanied by a plan that returns children to learning and prevents interruption from turning into a prolonged loss.

The responsibility for restoring education cannot be reduced to temporary initiatives and limited local efforts, no matter how important they are in the current circumstances. What is required is a sustainable response that guarantees the regularity and quality of study, addresses the disparities left by the interruption, and provides teachers and students with what they need to continue.

The success of this response also requires clear monitoring of the number of children who were able to return, their educational levels, and the extent to which the most affected groups have access to learning opportunities.

Reconstructing schools is a necessity, but reconnecting children to education is the true test of any talk about recovery. The building can be restored, the book can be printed, and the classroom can be reopened. However, the time that passes from the children’s lives cannot be restored, and every delay in addressing the effects of the interruption leaves a gap that may extend beyond the boundaries of the school to the child’s opportunities to build his life and choose his future.

In Gaza, classes are no longer measured by the minutes students spend in the classroom, but rather by the amount taken from their lives when they are deprived of them. When a child in the second grade sits on the ground of a nylon tent, while displaced families occupy his school rooms in search of shelter, the question becomes bigger than the date of the return of lessons: How can a society restore its future, if it leaves its children to pay with their lives the price for the absence of the most basic conditions for learning?