One year after Assad, rebuilding Syria must start with schools, not concrete

The year was 2011 and the war in Syria had only just begun. We had heard of other towns being bombed, but we honestly believed schools in Aleppo were safer than the children’s homes. The playground was full. We had just finished our lessons and let the children out for their break. I was standing with other teachers, watching them run and play. It felt like just another ordinary day.

Then we heard the aeroplane getting closer. We started calling the children back into their classrooms. I do not remember the moment of impact clearly. I only remember a sudden pain in my chest and my ears, and then nothing. When I opened my eyes, there was dust everywhere and the sound of children screaming. Some were lying on the ground, faces covered in dust and blood. Parents ran in, shouting the names of their sons and daughters. Six children never made it home that day.

This month, Syria marks one year since the fall of the Assad regime that bombed that playground. People talk now about reconstruction – about roads, bridges and buildings. Of course, we need roofs that do not leak and hospitals that are not in ruins. But after 14 years of teaching through war, I know something that many planners in distant capitals might overlook: education is not an optional extra. For children, it is as life-saving as food and shelter, and it has to be at the heart of rebuilding Syria.

I saw this first in my own home. After the attack, parents kept their children at home for a few weeks. I was too afraid to send my seven-year-old son back as well. But his fear and anxiety only grew. He missed his friends. He wanted to play and laugh like before. Keeping him shut inside did not keep him safe.

So a group of us teachers turned our homes into classrooms. Each of us took 10 to 15 children into our living rooms. We kept the lessons going and tried to give them some kind of routine. It helped a little, but it was not enough. The children needed more than exercise books and worksheets.

That was when we realised something important. Children do not only need books and blackboards. They need each other. They need to share their fears – and forget them for a while. School is not only a place for marks and exams. It is a window for children to breathe, to be children again, to step out of the reality of war for a few hours and into a different world, created together through stories, poems, songs, games and lessons.

Before the war, I had been a teacher for more than 20 years. I loved my job, but it was also a routine – a job from seven in the morning to three in the afternoon. I taught my classes, collected my salary and went home. After that missile hit the playground, all of this changed. I was no longer just an employee. I felt I was on the front line. There was a regime that wanted to take away our children’s right to learn and to feel safe. My role was to defend that right and make sure children claimed it, whatever the circumstances.

The years of war proved this to be true. Education during conflict is not a luxury you fund “once the emergency is over”. It is what keeps children standing in the middle of the emergency. It gives them stability and a sense of normal life. It tells them: you still have a future. When donors sent food and tents, we were grateful. But I wish more of them had understood that school can be as important to a child’s survival as a food basket.

Since that day, we have carried this responsibility through more airstrikes, cold winters, displacement and uncertainty. We have set up classrooms under olive trees, in tents and even in caves. Teaching was no longer just our profession. It became our way of keeping our children alive on the inside.

I can think of many children who could barely speak from fear when the war started. Today, some of them are at university. Some are already leading and taking part in building our new Syria. Without the schools we kept open against all the odds, we would not have those young men and women. Education is the quiet reason this first year of liberation feels like a beginning, not the end of a long collapse.

But hope alone will not rebuild our education system. The war did not only damage buildings. It exhausted teachers, traumatised children and pushed millions out of school. If this anniversary is to mean anything, education has to move from the margins of budgets and conferences to the centre.

That starts with teachers. We need long-term investment in training so that every teacher has the tools to give children strong lessons and emotional support in the classroom. We need advice that responds to the reality in each area, and we need psychological support for teachers themselves. You cannot ask a traumatised, underpaid and burnt-out teacher to heal a whole generation on their own.

Recognition of teachers’ role must also be reflected in salaries. If our new authorities and international donors really believe, as they say, that children are the future of Syria, then teachers’ pay and conditions should show that. In every reconstruction plan, a fair share of the budget should be ringfenced for schools, teacher salaries and training – not left to whatever is left over after the roads and power stations are costed.

At the same time, we need a serious effort, backed by donors, for the children – and now-adults – who dropped out of school during the war. We cannot simply write them off as a “lost generation”. They deserve second-chance programmes that fit around their lives, help them read and write with confidence, and give them skills that lead to real work. Funding for this kind of compensatory education should be treated as urgent, not as a side project when there is spare money.

Over the past 14 years, local and international organisations have worked with us to keep schools open, train teachers and repair classrooms. As the focus shifts to reconstruction, that partnership should not fade away. It should deepen – guided by the experience of the people who never left the classroom.

One year after liberation, it is tempting for politicians to talk mainly about cement, steel and big projects. From where I stand, in front of a chalkboard, I see a different priority. Fourteen years of war tried to break our children. Education helped them stand again. If the world really wants to help rebuild Syria, it should start where the bombs fell first: in the playgrounds and classrooms where our children are still trying, every morning, to believe in a future.