With the start of the new school year in Syria, the Ministry of Education appears to be facing serious challenges regarding the most sensitive entitlement at the level of human development and investment in science and education, with a reality that seems very difficult, even if its difficulty differs between one Syrian geography and another, in connection with the conditions of war and its repercussions on quarantine and people.
School restoration
According to the statistics of the Syrian Ministry of Education, today, Sunday, September 6, more than 5.2 million students, both male and female, in various Syrian governorates headed to their public and private schools with the start of the new academic year 2026-2027.
According to the Syrian news agency SANA, this year witnessed the rehabilitation and restoration of 1,370 schools, while last year witnessed the restoration and return of 2,017 schools to service, while more than 6,000 schools still need rehabilitation and maintenance.
SANA quoted a source in the Syrian Ministry of Education as confirming the reopening of 2,350 schools in the eastern regions, with schools’ readiness varying between governorates. In Raqqa, 1,137 schools out of about 1,439 were ready for the academic year, while about 300 schools needed maintenance.
As for Daraa, in implementation of the “Absher Houran” campaign, about 200 schools were restored and maintained, including 7 new schools that entered service at the beginning of the school year.
In Aleppo, 134 schools were maintained and restored and are now ready to receive more than 65,000 students, while about 1,950 schools are still in need of restoration to varying degrees.
As for Idlib, 650 schools have been rehabilitated and opened since December 8, 2024, and the Ministry of Education is working to secure textbooks for students either by operating printing presses at maximum capacity, especially with the increase in the number of students returning to Syria, whose number according to official statistics exceeded about 500 thousand students, or by recycling old books and using them again in education.
Adopting the Damascus curriculum
The Syrian Ministry of Education adopted the Damascus curriculum for the academic year 2025-2026 to be implemented during the academic year 2026-2027 in all Syrian governorates, confirming that the approved curricula are available on its new official website.
It also determined national standards for the new school curricula, as the curricula in Syria were distributed across three regions: “The Damascus Curriculum,” which was taught in areas under the control of the former regime, the “Idlib Curriculum,” or “The Liberation Curriculum,” which was taught in northwestern Syria, and the “Northeast Syria Curriculum” under the administration of the “SDF.”
Huge challenges
Thinker and educator Aziz Ismail believes that the Syrian Ministry of Education faces great challenges related to seeking to bridge the educational gap left by the long years of war, combating school dropouts, and bridging educational disparities between one Syrian region and another. These are matters, in his conviction, related to the difference in the environment and the varying repercussions of the war on it between these regions.
In his speech to RT, Ismail pointed out that the Syrian government must not hesitate to support the educational process and education in general, even if this support comes at the expense of other sectors, because restoring society and enabling it to overcome its divisions comes through keeping children busy with education, opening the doors to the future for them, and investing in their minds before anything else, instead of pushing them to retreat behind religious and social fanaticism that has been fueled by the long years of war.
The educational thinker stressed the need for educational curricula, especially intellectual and historical ones, not to carry any stigma or grudges that encourage division in light of the change that took place in Syria, so that it does not appear to be directed against a group of Syrians. He pointed out that the success of the educational process begins from the point of keeping it away from politicization and devoting it to pure sciences and a comprehensive national narrative away from maliciousness, which is something that teachers must understand in the first place so that they do not carry their religious and political ideas into the classroom and do not evaluate their students based on Their distance or proximity to these ideas.
