http://www.jewishworldreview.com | (KRT) BAGHDAD Ghada Jassen's 5th-grade students used to greet her each morning with a salute of "Long live Saddam Hussein!" as she walked into the classroom, then "Long live the Baath Party!" as she motioned for them to take their seats.
Their textbooks were filled with Saddam's regime as well: Math texts substituted S and H for the variables X and Y, reading comprehension paragraphs discussed Zionist aggression and using oil as a political weapon, and other exercises promoted joining the Popular Army as an everyday activity such as buying a music cassette or acting in a play.
"We didn't believe these things but we had to say them," said Jassen, who taught for 18 years under Saddam's regime. "Saddam was there in all the books, even the math books."
That is changing, as Iraqi teachers and parents team up with U.S. and international organizations to root the former Iraqi dictator out of textbooks and replace militaristic rote learning in Iraqi classrooms.
In the months since the fall of the regime, a panel of 37 Iraqi secondary school teachers working through the interim Ministry of Education has been reviewing the nation's textbooks, excising everything from math word problems about trench digging on the Iranian border to photos of tanks and rifles.
"They've gone through and removed Baath propaganda statements, photos of Saddam Hussein, discriminatory statements about groups," said Dorothy Mazaka, a U.S. Agency for International Development education specialist, who is working as a liaison to the Ministry of Education.
The goal is to have sanitized interim textbooks reprinted, using $97 million in UN oil-for-food money, by the time Iraqi youths return to school in September. A few textbooks, including the "patriotic education" series - described by one teacher as "100 percent Saddam propaganda" - will be dropped entirely.
"We don't want patriotic education anymore. Nothing about war," said Dunia Nabel, 27, a primary school teacher in Baghdad. "We want flowers and springtime in the texts, not rifles and tanks."
Informal revision of Iraq's school texts and classroom rituals started almost as soon as children went back to classes in late May, weeks after the fall of the regime. Students, most acting without instruction, ripped out the photo of Hussein at the start of each text and quickly learned a new classroom salute: "Long live great Iraq!"
That's not to say the transition has been easy for all the children after years of political indoctrination.
Jassen's 5-year-old daughter still races to the television to kiss Saddam's face when his image appears. She also skips around the house singing "The sun shines because of you, Saddam; the birds sing from your love, Saddam."
Her older sister, Estbraq, is clearly uneasy when asked what she thinks about the deposed Iraqi ruler.
"I liked Saddam before. Now I don't know," the 12-year-old said, hesitantly.
Teachers say confusion is natural, particularly among the children of Baath Party members.
"The kids were brainwashed. To them Saddam was a hero. From the books, from television, that's all they heard," Nabel said. But many children also learned at home that much of what they were being taught was a lie, she said.
Because of that, "I think they weren't satisfied with what I was teaching before, but they were afraid to let me know that," she said. "If you disagreed, well," she said, grimacing and drawing an imaginary knife across her throat.
A majority of Iraqi parents, researchers say, now want a new type of education, one that eliminates propaganda, bans physical punishment in classrooms and updates teaching styles.
"We want to have real education, to be a progressive country," said Al Sa'ad Majid al Musowi, a businessman on Baghdad's city council, who brought up education reform as a priority at the council's first meeting.
"Education is very important to the reconstruction of our society. If you want to civilize society, you must care about education," he said.
International agencies say they are working toward that goal on a variety of fronts. Agencies will spend at least $7 million this fall giving out back-to-school kits that include paper, pens and teacher supplies; education offices will get new computers and desks.
After a survey found 80 percent of schools in the country in poor condition, with often little more than walls and a chalkboard, U.S. contractors, civil affairs workers and non-governmental organizations are supplying new desks, building bathrooms and rebuilding classrooms.
Teachers have received substantial pay raises under the U.S.-led interim government and are getting training in "participatory education" rather than rote learning. They also are being urged to abandon old methods of physical discipline, a major complaint among parents.
Consultants also are working on finding ways to keep girls, who often leave school by age 14 for cultural and economic reasons, in classrooms longer.
"Right now Iraq does not have a modern system of education whatsoever," Mazaka said. But the country "was the pearl of education in the Middle East" in the late 1960s, and "we want to help them reach their dream again," she said.
Making changes will take time. Consultants don't expect that overhauled textbooks and curriculums will be in place for perhaps two years, after a new Iraqi-run government is voted into office and able to have input.
Changing the mind-set of children - as well as teachers - will take time. Now "if you give any kid a pen and paper, he'll draw a tank firing toward an airplane," Nabel said. Here, "kids are not kids."
But "these kids could change everything here in time," she said. "We know we can't change our generation. We have to use the new generation to change things."
For now, gaps left in Iraq's textbooks by the removal of anti-Zionist reading passages and militaristic word problems are being filled with flowers while experts study other options.
Majeed Muhammad Salih, 61, who has taught English for 36 years in Iraqi's high schools, knows the kind of thing that should fill such gaps permanently.
He pulls a well-thumbed text by Socrates from the bookshelf in his home and opens to a heavily underlined passage on the benefits of Athenian democracy.
"Iraq needs this," he said. "This opens the brain and makes one think as a human being."
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