I recently came across a tweet that said "In Palestine, the minister of education ended the school year because ALL of his students were MURDERED."
I also read that schools were to be shuttered in the Gaza Strip in anticipation of further violence.
There is a genocide that is going on at this point in the world. We feel utterly lost for words for all the children and people who are suffering in these brutally tough times. Schools are a place for education and they are safe spaces. If a child is a sole "survivor" in his entire school, imagine the horror that he/she has to go through, having found out that all their peers were murdered. If the conflict ends, could the child ever go back to school? The "survivor" children would be laden with psychological problems and they could never be truly integrated back into the society. By attacking children, you are murdering the youth, meaning that all spaces occupied by the youth such as schools then shut down. All the "survivor" children, even years after ceasefire could never have that feeling of "normalcy." Linking this to APS attack, even after the event passed, children and parents both were terrified of sending their children back to school. The children themselves felt scared, nervous and threatened. I remember going to school and seeing all these people from the army who were holding and pointing guns and it made school a danger zone for me. For other people, some parents might have never sent their children back to school. These attacks then hinder your education as well.
Think about also, the parents who themselves are teachers and then their children are students, closing schools would mean a psychological impact on both the parents and the children. It really boils down to how both are dependent on each other but both have faced trauma which renders one incapable of truly providing support to the other.
Children are dying. Even after the ceasefire, there will be no children left to go back to schools or perhaps it will take time for society to function as normal. As for us, sitting in our homes, reading such a tweet, makes us think about this situation. I remember my school was one of those which had received a death threat during the time when APS attack happened. It comes down to the question of whether you would sacrifice on your education or your mental health to take a risk. What is happening right now is truly devastating. I cannot even imagine what parents must be going through. Speaking generally, after the ceasefires, are countries able to give proper psychological care to both the students and teachers? What would be the steps taken for proper reintegration?
Apart from this, I also came across an article which said "Israel’s Minister of Education, Yifat Shasha Biton, decided on Thursday to cancel the permanent operating licenses of the schools after finding alleged “dangerous incitement” in Palestinian curriculum textbooks, according to the Israeli newspaper Maariv. "The foreign ministry said the closures took place on “inconsistent” grounds adding that it was part of a project to erase Palestinian heritage from Jerusalem." As a child, If your school gets shut down based on your curriculum, it would obviously instil in you the thought that the curriculum was faulty even when it is not. This also reminds me of how teachers are in a dilemma then, what do they believe in and what do they teach? When you do not let students study their own culture and heritage in a proper way or not at all, they will grow up not knowing a lot of things. What do you guys think about this?