University of Alberta is a part of new United Nations project designed to help rebuild education system of war torn Iraq. Programme participant, a chemistry professor says that “While years of war and violence have emptied most classrooms of books and basic equipment, students keep coming to her to learn. It isn’t easy, we are suffering. But despite of all these things, the people they come,”
People of Iraq like everybody else in the world want to live and to study for prosperous future generations. In an attempt to help rebuild her country’s devastated educational system, UNESCO, the United Nations’ culture agency, has sent Prof. Al-Salihi and 13 other Iraqi professors to the University of Alberta on a twenty three day long course to learn from the school’s education experts and to return to Iraq to teach other teachers. Teacher Training Network for Iraq is partly funded by the Iraqi government. Programme focuses on numerous teaching skills apart from teaching techniques it also includes how to design instructional packages and modernize their outdated curriculums. Northern Iraq is more stable as compared to the central and southern parts of the country. War trodden country lacks buildings, books, and equipments such as chemicals and microscopes. War on terror isn’t the only hurdle, country is facing ongoing deadly violence fuelled by sectarian an ethnic conflicts. Iraq has one of the worst records for school attacks in the world. Since the U.S. lead invasion begun in 2003, more than 200 university professors have been killed. Dozens more are either kidnapped or fled the country. Apart from the U.S. invasion many militants view university campuses as centres of non-Islamic thought and routinely target them, which makes these institutions even more vulnerable to violence.