More discouraging news from Iraq

Many of my readers are academics or students and naturally have their complaints about their educational institutions. McClatchy's Inside Iraq has a story that may be hard for most of us here to match:

One of the old story that I heard was about the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was when one of his advisers told him that corruption had invaded most of the ministries. The story says that Churchill asked him "how about the ministries of education and justice?'. The adviserr said "they are fine until now". Churchill answered him "then England is fine"

I do not know for sure whether the story is real or no but what I care about is its idea or main point. It gives an idea about the importance of the two ministries.

During my work, I heard different stories about corruption including these two ministries. I heard about judges who released insurgents and criminals and I heard about teachers who gives high marks for money but all I heard were stories without evidences but the story of the Monday was somethings different.

I saw one of the my friends who teaches English language in of the high schools. After few minutes of talking about the main issue that all Iraqis talk about , I mean security situation and life troubles, I asked him about his work and thought to hear some complains because of the lazy students but the story he told me was something completely new for me and killed any hope to have a new good life in this country.

He told me that one of his student is the son of his educational inspector. My friend told me that this student could not pass the exams because he knows nothing about English language. The educational inspector duty is to check whether the teacher is doing his duty correctly and to help him in passing over any problems to improve the level of the students but this one is completely different.

In addition to neglecting his own son, he threatened to send my friend to jail because he did not give the success mark for his son. The educational inspector said "I will send this teacher to jail and if he believes that anyone can help him then he is wrong"

It looks that our problem is so deep because people who are supposed to apply law consider themselves as exceptions.

I know that any building starts from the base and the base of building a new country starts from scholls where the youngs get either the rights principles or the wrong ones. For sure, having people like this inspector would never install the right bases

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