Lebanon's education crisis deepens amid war and economic collapse

 As the skies fell quiet over Beirut this week, displaced Lebanese piled into cars and headed south for home, but any return to normality remains elusive given their economy was already in freefall even before war broke out last year and no solutions seem at hand.

A ceasefire between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah came into effect at dawn on Wednesday after the conflict escalated in September.

Although the fighting has stopped - at least for now - hard days lie ahead for worn-out people who have been reeling from multiple crises since the economic implosion of 2019.

The crisis has hit education especially hard.

At least 500 public schools, roughly one in two in what is a badly under-funded sector, were converted into shelters in recent months to house many of the 1.2 million people fleeing the fighting, Save the Children said last month.

And 2024 marks the sixth straight year that Lebanon's 1.5 million children faced significant disruptions to schooling, worsening their long-term physical and mental outlook, it said.

Ameer Shweekh is one of those children.

Forced to flee his home in the southern city of Tyre two months ago, the 13-year-old got a place at the Omar El Zeeny public school in a working-class neighborhood in Beirut when the school year started this month.

Sitting in one of the school's cold, old - if clean - classrooms the day before the ceasefire took effect, he said he was unhappy with the quality of his learning.

Shweekh used to attend a private school in south Lebanon.

"The level of the foreign language class here is very low. Over there it was a higher level, we were learning a language. Here we are learning what a sentence is."

Shweekh said he still logs onto online classes from his former school when he finishes his new studies each afternoon.

But he knows he is falling behind, especially in coding - there are simply no computers at his new school.

"I do not practice it, so I forgot it all," he said. "If we stay like this, I don't think I can do it. The school doesn't teach it."

Compound crises and the toll of war

Lebanon was once an educational beacon in the region, with its international schools and prestigious universities drawing students from across the Arab world.

Now, it ranks last among Arab countries in international assessments.

A devastating port explosion in August 2020, the COVID pandemic, and allegations of state corruption have set the economy on a downward trajectory for years. Funding for learning has largely dried up, as has help from non-governmental bodies and United Nations agencies.

The education community has only received 19% of the donor funding it needs this year, said Janhvi Kanoria, a director at Education Above All (EAA), a Qatar-based global education foundation.

"We have a lost generation in Lebanon," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview. "How do you recover from these multiple crises?" she added.

The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which was ignited by the Israel-Hamas War last year before escalating in September, has deepened Lebanon's economic malaise with dire consequences for public services.

This month, the World Bank estimated that the fighting caused $8.5 billion in damage and losses.

The bank forecast that Lebanon's real gross domestic product would contract by at least 5.7% in 2024, compared to the 0.9% growth in GDP it would have expected without war.

The years-long financial crisis, which saw 80% of the population sink below the poverty line, also starved the education ministry of funds even as student numbers were growing.

As families struggled, many parents moved children from expensive private schools into the overstretched public system, which was also teaching tens of thousands of Syrian children who had fled war in their own country in 2011.

A World Bank report found that in the 2020-2021 school year, 55,000 students left private schools to join public ones.

Long and steady decline

Around 60% of students attend private schools, and these institutions have traditionally benefited from more government support than public schools.

A 2023 report by the Centre for Lebanese Studies (CLS), a research group, found state funding to the private educational sector was around $900 million annually, with high-income groups benefiting from 64% of this aid, while poorer groups received 16% of school allowances.

"This reflects the inequity of the treasury's expenditure on education, as the most vulnerable receive low levels of assistance, reinforcing the disparities between social groups," the report said.

The demise of what was a strong public education sector predates the recent run of crises that hit Lebanon.

Public education first plunged downhill in the 1980s when warring sectarian militias began exerting heavy influence over schools, said Nehme Nehme, author of the CLS report.

Nehme said that the accord that ended the civil war of that era "enshrined" the role of militias-turned-politicians in the public sector and in educational institutions in particular.

Since then, appointments have been driven by political affiliation rather than merit, he added.

"Administrative bodies started coming apart, including the education ministry," he said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

School curriculums have not been updated or even assessed since 1997, he added.

Politics permeated school subjects, and factions bickered over the wording of history and civics textbooks, he said.

In 2016, the education ministry was asked to slash its budget, so it hacked back the curriculum by 30% and cut the number of days in the school year, Nehme said.

Public schools are now a far cry from their 1960s heyday.

"Today functionally, the efficiency of teaching in the public school is about 2.5 years of schooling out of 12 years," he said. In the private sector, it rises to between four and five years, he added.

"Functionally, we do not have education, neither in the public sector nor in the (mid and lower tier) private schools," he said.

"If we restore the education system now, we need another 10 years to go back to point zero."