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.