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What is School For? Finding Better Answers in a Fragile Time
Democracy lives or dies in empty classrooms
Like most lessons, the ones that stay with you stay because they break something inside of you. The one I want to tell you about arrived in fragments: a comment that cracked my comfortable assumptions, a scene that shattered the wall between what I wanted to believe and what I couldn’t unsee. Both reshaped my understanding of what school is and means.
As Assad’s regime crumbles and celebrations fill Damascus streets, I find myself haunted by a conversation from nine years ago — one that speaks to this moment with unexpected urgency.
Nine years ago, as a guest of the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, I met with education officials who spoke of their struggle to accommodate Syrian refugee children fleeing Assad’s violence. Because Syria borders Lebanon, it was a safe harbor. Lebanese classrooms doubled overnight, straining capacity in both human and physical resources. These officials spoke ruefully of not being able to account for the exact number of refugee children.
“We’ve doubled our capacity,” they told me, pride mixing with exhaustion in their voices. “We’ve added night schools to day schools, fitting in a hundred more children per grade.”
