Khuyut platform pays special attention to the issue of education in Yemen, because it believes that education reform is the most important preamble to mend the faltering life system in a shattered country, due to the successive crises, which led eight years ago, to a grinding war, in which the education system was most targeted.
Since its launch, in January 2021, the platform has worked to increase publication in the details of the educational situation in the crushed country, it has been accumulating on a vital file titled (Return to the Dark Ages...Has Yemen lost its battle against ignorance?). All this, because it perceives, from the position of its professional and moral presence, "in the media and independent opinion platforms, a double responsibility, in placing the future of the current and the next Yemeni generations among the priorities of its work in order to prevent a further waste and a systematic destruction and sabotage of the educational process."
Furthermore, the follower of the content of the accumulated file , which we recall on the occasion of the International Day of Education on January 24 every year, will not only stand on the status of the education nowadays with all its misery, but rather, the readings will lead him to stations not far away in the contemporary history of Yemen, when the Yemenis tried, with individual and collective initiatives, to keep pace with the era through the education gateway. So that, more than one reading revealed the early fusion with the modern education, and how the migration of the Yemenis contributed to this by transferring a small part of the knowledge of the era to the closed Yemeni interior at that time, as well as how the village clubs in the Aden colony were able to contribute to the running of the schools outside the traditional Imamate education system in the isolated villages. Thus, because of their involvement in the life of civilization made the comparison between what the countries of the world live in and the isolated country to which they belong, which they left forcibly, based only on the basis of modern education.
Meanwhile, the Imamate regime was afraid of modern education, and only, under intense pressure, sent a group of students who are from a trusted families to study the modern studies outside Yemen, in order to be a part of its functional system in the future. So, those scholarship students, after that, became the lever of the transformation in the republican Yemen and the builders of its modern institutions.
However, the little light that leaked here and there became, within a few years in the republican era, a strong indicator of a comparison between two times, two consciousnesses, and two worlds, whose differences were made by modern education, which once began to become a part of the Yemenis’ need, just like food and air, until the dark forces, infiltrating into the Republican body, began to turn it off, starting with creating a parallel religious educational system under an official sponsorship, leading, then, to emptying the educational curriculum of its innovative content and modernity, under the pretext of Yemenization, and ending with maximizing contempt for the teaching profession in the public consciousness, distorting its message, starving the workers in its field, and corrupting its tools.
Nonetheless, the example of Aden city and its surroundings in the modern education, in which it began early, then followed by the large literacy campaign in the countryside and villages of the post-independence state that eliminated in the mid-1980s, has become a beautiful past that is difficult to restore, after it was dismantled and submerged with compound ignorance to be equal to its counterpart in everything.
When the war came, the status of education was already in this miserable situation, which added to it a double and deadly misery. As the warring parties are originally against the life that education pours into the veins of people, So they used tools of destruction that were more solid and cruel than those used by the rulers who preceded them. Whereas they turned schools into a military barracks and war barricaders, while young students into Mujahideen(fighters) on the fronts, and teachers into beggars, but those who are associated with militia leaders in the north and south into military commanders and supervisors, besides turning the school curriculum into political textbooks, this after emptying their content in favor of mobilization speeches.
Moreover, the education with all its shallowness, in times of war, became not free, in a clear contradiction with the legal texts that say education is free - especially in the stages of basic education – and it was left to the owners of the private funds to commodify the education in a private schools that have spread like mushrooms in alleys and neighborhoods, without any real supervision, and all this because of the high demand for the private education, as an alternative to the education in public schools whose teachers have abandoned them and in which the volunteers, with little experience and qualifications, become the ones who teach. On the other hand, the owners of the private schools take the advantage of the need of teachers and new graduates by giving them low salaries in exchange for teaching students who are certain in advance that they will succeed excellently for the money that their families pay for this service.
Away from this completely dark picture of the status of education during wartime, there are bright spots of resistance, intensified in the insistence on continuing education even in a destroyed schools, under trees and in caves, and in addition to the destitute families who borrow and sacrifice their livelihood in order for their children to obtain education of any kind. Furthermore, the teachers who are enlightened by their living conscience to perform their duty without obtaining any of their job rights, and the great hope that the Yemenis cling to leave the battlefield, to start a new life far from the smell of gunpowder and immersed in the smell of chalks.
