Sectarian Schooling

Sectarian Classrooms

In this week's Camino a Ítaca a look into some Spanish classrooms via the Levant and its sectarian divisions. Click over to read the original in Spanish published in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF abajo)

I had never seen such provocative lingerie in shop windows anywhere else in the world. The silk strips found in the window displays in New York, Amsterdam, Paris and Tokyo all seemed like chaste winter pajamas in comparison. True, it was the Armenian quarter of the city, but this was Damascus, the heart of Syria. It wasn’t a place I expected to see such open paeans to pleasure. But in the city where Saul of Tarsus started hearing voices and fell off his horse under the Bab Tuma gate, that’s how juxtaposed things were. That is, at least before the war.

Moving from neighborhood to neighborhood was akin to changing cities or even countries by simply crossing a street. The Shia neighborhoods with their posters of martyrs and the Sunni neighborhoods that flank each side of the walled city each meet in the Umayyad Mosque. A sumptuous building that was once a Byzantine church built from the ribs of a temple to Jupiter.

These predominant neighborhoods run cheek by jowl alongside Maronite Christians on one side of the street and Syriac Christians on the other, with the Druze just a bit further down. There is even a Jewish neighborhood, if now largely in name only. It’s a sectarian fragmentation that is reflected across the region, like the divisions found across the border in Beirut or 300kms south in Jerusalem, though without the physical barriers like their apartheid walls.

I hadn’t thought of my travels through the region for some time. At least since the world’s focus had been shifted away from Russia’s interventions in Syria to their more jingoistic intentions in Ukraine. That is until my daughter told me about the difficulties her class was having to choose what to do for their Christmas representation.

She believed her class should do one thing, something secular, while the other class should be able to do something more religiously oriented. This was because the classes had been split between those who go to Catholic religion classes and those who go to Valores.

At first, this seemed practical. No one had to leave their classroom simply because some were being taught the world was created in seven days while others were forbidden to learn anything new. But then I thought about it and realized that, while the ‘solution’ may be practical, it was the complete antithesis of the entire ethos of public schooling and its democratic principles of coexistence. A public school is  a place meant to bring together all different strata of society in one place where they can learn to live and work together. But my daughter’s classrooms had been divided along sectarian lines, just as the cities in the Middle East had been sundered and disjointed.  

The presence of sectarian religious education rather than a comparative focus in public schools has always puzzled me. The cognitive dissonance produced by hearing in one class about Adam’s rib, to learning about evolution, science and constitutional rights like equality in others, has to be daunting.

But if it is to remain a fixture of the system, the least that can be done is avoid a Balkanization of the classroom, because we all know where that can lead.