Expats in Their Own Country: The Education Business That Is Destroying Future Generations

A phenomenon has emerged and intensified in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region since 2003: the explosion of private, supposedly international schools and universities, almost exclusively English-speaking and prohibitively expensive. A luxury for many, a necessity and a source of comfort for others, but a catastrophe on a broader societal scale.

There are several hundred of them, scattered across Erbil, Duhok, and Sulaymaniyah, attracting a large segment of the middle and upper social classes. What appeals to parents? More comfortable infrastructure than public institutions, teaching methods considered more modern, a sense of comfort and security linked to social selection, and above all, the pride of having children who are perfectly fluent in English. While these factors are entirely understandable for any parent - who would not want the best for their child? - English-language private education is destroying centuries of cultural, linguistic, and literary progress while deepening social segregation.

All local communities are affected: affluent Arabs living in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, Kurds who benefited from the economic boom of recent decades, and Assyrian-Chaldean-Syriac communities. The situation is worrying for Arabs and Kurds, but it does not threaten their existence, as there will always be millions of speakers preserving their language and identity. For our community, however, the trend is dramatic because a far greater proportion of our youth ends up in these private schools, threatening our very survival. They forget their mother tongue and no longer master other local languages. Noor Matti had already highlighted this issue in an article published two years ago in The Assyrian Journal: “The most likely scenario is they become so Westernized in their small English circles, they are led to move abroad.” In short, our youth are becoming expatriates in their own country, with the blessing of our institutions and the pride of their parents.

This is where public awareness must be raised. Parents need to understand that speaking English is certainly valuable in a globalized world, but raising children who are unable to articulate precise ideas in their mother tongue or a local language is absurd. We are not building these students' future, we are destroying their identity and paying dearly for it. A private school or university costs on average between 2,000 and 10,000 USD per year per student, equivalent to an average annual salary. For a long time, our parents mastered many languages perfectly: Sureth, Arabic, Kurdish, Turkmen in Kirkuk, sometimes Armenian or French, and of course a perfectly respectable level of English. That is far more than the overwhelming majority of the world's population. So how did we descend into such nonsense?

In my view, the phenomenon can be explained by two reasons.

First, the disinvestment in public education and higher education has caused a serious and significant deterioration in teaching quality. Many public schools and universities are poorly maintained, sometimes even unsanitary, not to mention the salary crisis affecting civil servants since 2014. The management of many universities isn’t up to standard, and it is common to see certain administrators carrying out the overwhelming workload of an entire department while other employees are incapable of properly using a computer. Public education is perceived as obsolete, outdated, incapable of meeting the needs of today's world, but this perception is largely inaccurate and biased in favor of the private sector.

Second, the rapid embourgeoisement of part of the population after 2003, without being accompanied by deep intellectual progress, created a tendency to glorify a foreign culture perceived as more prestigious. We have internalized a contempt for local cultures and languages in favor of what is foreign and Western in general, and American English in particular. How many parents are proud of having children who speak perfect English? How many prefer speaking barely passable English with them rather than ancient Aramaic, Kurdish, or Arabic? Beyond the presumed prestige, private education allows those who can afford it to avoid interacting with more modest social groups. To the point that in certain communities, such as Ankawa, strong social pressure has developed to impose English-language private education over local alternatives. Even schools affiliated with our churches have developed these institutions, certainly of high quality, but entirely English-speaking and where our own language is barely taught. Parents from the Millennial generation are raising Generation Alpha in a world where they will be strangers in their own country. Their expectations and ambitions will revolve around careers disconnected from the reality of the Iraqi labor market. What would an employer do with a talented young person who speaks English very well but is incapable of communicating with certain colleagues or clients?

The situation is all the more absurd because the principal communities affected, Kurds and Assyrian-Chaldeans, are the very communities that fought for centuries to resist the cultural domination of their neighbors. Instead, we are forcing our children to stop speaking their local languages fluently, and even the English they master will almost never be as good as that of a native speaker. We have reached a point where many young people no longer have a language in which they can write a flawless letter or read a book with complete ease.

The issue is far more serious than it appears. For our community, what is at stake is the very survival of a population speaking Sureth both vernacularly and academically, at a time when the emigration of the majority of us already poses an existential threat to our language and culture. More broadly, we are forcing our children into a globalized world not through mutual enrichment, but through loss of identity and self-denigration. Because of the exorbitant costs of these schools and a consumerist lifestyle, we are no longer even capable of having more than two children per family. We support a system of social segregation rather than national coexistence. We are creating an entire generation fully permeable to an exogenous culture and therefore entirely susceptible to manipulation.

It is urgent to act, each at our own level.

• At the level of our community, we must regain awareness of the importance of preserving our living language as an identity, an intellectual wealth, and a shared heritage, rather than treating it as a mere folkloric accessory. Public schools entirely taught in Syriac, which are nonetheless of high quality, must regain value in our minds. Knowledge of Arabic and Kurdish must be flawless, and in any case, English will remain unavoidable.

• At the level of parents, this also requires discipline regarding the use of our mother tongue, which must remain the absolute norm. We must become aware of the critical role we play after decades of emigration and ethnic and cultural influences from neighboring peoples or dominant global powers. We must be able to send our children to public schools and use the money saved to invest in their artistic and athletic development, in their creativity and discovery of the world.

• At the level of political decision-makers, an immediate investment plan for public education must be established to build the future of our communities, where everyone has access to quality education and not only a small elite that benefited from the economic trickle-down effect after 2003. Otherwise, we will soon face unrest from those who have been economically and intellectually marginalized for years, while others prosper ostentatiously and sometimes illegitimately.

• Our Churches must become aware of their societal duty beyond their authority. They are a major, undeniable, and legitimate actor in much of what concerns our community. Schools affiliated with Churches should therefore include a significant amount of teaching in Syriac because they are guardians of our cultural heritage. They must also ensure complete mastery of other local languages and not exclusively English.

The urgency is absolute. Every passing year widens the gap between the country's social classes, creates globalized and impressionable children, turns education into a business rather than a public duty, and jeopardizes the survival and prosperity of local languages. Everyone must act at their own level. Education is neither a slogan nor a business, but an essential right.