[LINK] "Syrians see the limits of an education in refuge"

[rfmcdonald]

Al Jazeera's Michael Pizzi reports on how Syrian refugees lack basic educational opportunities.

One morning last year, Alaa, 17, boarded a bus out of the Zaatari Syrian refugee camp to a nearby school to take the tawjihi, the grueling, end-of-high-school examination that is a rite of passage for teenagers in Jordan. Passing the test, which ostensibly opens the door to Jordanian universities, was the best way to keep her life on track while waiting out Syria’s war in the dusty tent city that is Zaatari — or so Alaa was told. Every day for several months, she studied — in her overcrowded classroom, at a tawjihi prep center and at night in her family’s trailer, until darkness fell and reading became impossible.

She aced the test, against steep odds; only 2 percent of her peers in camp passed. But Alaa wondered what success has done for her. “After the tawjihi, what’s next?” she asked. Paying the steep foreigner-rate tuition at a Jordanian university is out of the question for her parents, who, like many of the other 1 million Syrian refugees in Jordan, are depleted of savings, and scholarship opportunities are extremely rare. The United Nations typically tries to guarantee education through age 17. After that, refugees are on their own. “All the students who passed are still sitting in their tents, doing nothing,” she pointed out. “So what difference did my score make?”

As Syria’s war drags into its fifth year, hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees are faced with the very real prospect of whiling away the prime of their lives in exile as their futures hang in the balance. In Jordan high dropout rates among Syrian teens, coupled with discouragingly low passing rates for those who make it to the tawjihi, raise fears that a generation of refugees could fail to earn the equivalent of a high school education. Moreover, the few who pass the test, like Alaa, don’t know what to do with their schooling. Except for a few dozen scholarship opportunities mostly in the Middle East and Europe, there is almost no avenue to higher education for even the most motivated youths.

Though poverty and the need to work are also factors, education advocates say the absence of a real incentive to finish high school urgently needs to be addressed. Failing to do so could have devastating consequences not just for these individuals but also for Syria’s future, said Naserddine Touaibia, a Zaatari camp official. “This generation is the one that will go back to Syria and rebuild,” he said. “If we don’t invest in [these refugees] right now, we risk having not only a lost generation but a lost Syria as well.”