The revisions have also affected teaching content dealing with political life, citizenship, democratic participation, local administration and the media. These changes have reopened the debate over the standards used by the Ministry of Education when it reviews curricula, and how far they take into account Syria's social and cultural diversity, amid questions about the nature and aims of the amendments, and whether they fall simply within a review of content linked to the former regime or go further towards reshaping how society is represented in school books. Comparisons posted on social media between different editions of school textbooks show amendments to material for several grades, including the early years and seventh grade, as well as the sixth-grade primary textbook "Social Studies".
It emerges that this last book, reissued for the current academic year, originally dates back to the 2012–2013 school year, with changes added that include the removal of material linked to the former regime, alongside lessons on local administration, political life, citizenship, the media and democratic participation. The changes were not limited to texts; they also extended to images and illustrations using Photoshop. Hijabs were added – and in some cases long robes – to drawn female characters, entire pictures of women were deleted, statues were covered, and sculptures and artworks were removed or replaced with others.
The visual alterations to paintings and expressive illustrations became a main focus of controversy, after committees removed the world-famous painting "Mona Lisa" and deleted a drawing showing a girl skipping rope beside two children in textbooks for early age groups. The revisions also extended to historical figures and symbols. The Phoenician princess Elissar, founder of Carthage, was affected when a painting depicting her on a hunting trip was dropped and replaced with another portrait that had been digitally modified to cover the chin and neck – a step critics saw as imposing contemporary ideological standards on an ancient historical era.
One of the examples that provoked ridicule and debate was dressing a pharaonic statue in a striped shirt, which many users likened to prison uniforms. A new batch of visual comparisons circulated on social media documented far-reaching changes introduced to the new Syrian school curricula in particular history books, with the new editions showing the removal of prominent national and pan-Arab figures and the alteration of the content of historical passages, amid sharp questions and concerns about systematic ideological and sectarian exclusion. Activists highlighted information that caused widespread anger and was described as "a blatant falsification of history".
The updated curriculum contains passages portraying the "martyrs" executed on 6 May by the Ottoman governor Jamal Pasha, known as the Butcher, as "agents of Britain and France", instead of their historical description as symbols of the national movement resisting Ottoman colonial rule. The changes also include deleting the picture of Sultan Pasha al-Atrash and replacing it with that of Sheikh Saleh al-Ali, a move that raised fears of exclusion on sectarian grounds. The alterations further removed a photograph of the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The revisions reached school maps too, with the district of Iskenderun and the occupied Syrian Golan omitted from one of the maps, as well as the deletion of a paragraph on the role of Syrian women in resisting the French Mandate. This has raised questions about the motives behind these changes and their impact on the historical narrative presented to pupils. The nature of these changes and how they were carried out unleashed a wave of sarcastic comments on social platforms, where many users felt some of the alterations were random and lacked unified artistic standards to ensure visual coherence within a single textbook.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
