Yemeni children deserve a better education

All the talk about children and the problems they face has increased in recent years. We see and read about many workshops and training courses for people to deal with children’s problems whether they are within families or living on the streets. Once in a while an organization, normally foreign, will publish a study on children in Yemen using statistics that are far from accurate. 

However, despite all this attention we do not see any real progress in tackling the problems of children. In this issue, the Yemen Observer features a story on children that spend a great deal of their free time in internet cafes, subject to all sorts of dangers with no responsible supervision. Society needs to realize that child behavior is a result of many factors ranging from family, school to society. Considering the family and the high rate of illiteracy among men and women in Yemen, we cannot expect the results to be pleasing. The majority of parents treat their children randomly and by nature are not there to respond to queries, to attend to school issues if they are called because the father will be chewing qat and the mother is with her fellow women. Worse than this, some parents will make their children work either in Yemen or send them to a neighboring country.

Schools plays their part in making the situation of children worse. At public schools, in primary classes, from grade 1 up to 7, the number of students in each class can reach 70-80. This provides very little educational benefit. Teachers of this level are not sufficiently qualified to deal with building the generations of the future. Teachers do not fully understand the needs of the needs of their students, and even if they do, class numbers are prohibitively large. Private schools are not much better except with smaller class sizes.

Media sources – especially television –  cause distortion and confusion in children’s minds between reality and fantasy and subject them to all sorts of violence. Additionally,  the spread of foreign satellite channels contributes to children suffering from a loss in their identity and belonging. 

The solution, we believe, lies not in training people to deal with street-children or those in schools; we need to start a permanent campaign to raise awareness among parents on how to treat children and help them understand the nature of childhood in order to tackle their issues responsibly. Another imperative is to improve the quality of primary education by assigning highly qualified teachers to this level, teachers who are trained in child psychology, then building more schools to lower the number of students in classes. Class sizes should not exceed 40, and education should be compulsory and completely free. 

The situation of children in Yemen is disastrous, and it demands immediate treatment if we are serious about forging real development and progress for the country. We know that talking about children in Yemen is very broad where there child labor, orphans, trafficking, poor education, poverty, and poor health. Ultimate, it is family and schools that carry the biggest responsibility. When will we see schools that actually help polish the talents of children in their early levels? The answers here are a  drastic overhaul of the education system and continued campaigns for parents information. Summer vacation is now upon us: let us do something useful for our children, protect them from social dangers, and allow their talents to bloom.

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