A screen as a blackboard. Even before Lebanon was reconfined, Saturday, November 14, for two weeks, the schools, which had painfully resumed face-to-face reception, were closed, as a health measure in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. The luckiest students take lessons online. Lebanon has crossed the threshold of 100,000 cases of contamination and deplored, Monday, November 16, 868 deaths; the hospitals that take care of these patients are overwhelmed. If the parents most anxious about the virus are relieved by the restrictions, many others fear that a second school year will be in jeopardy.
“This year is the most difficult we have experienced in terms of education, concedes Hilda El-Khoury, director of educational and educational guidance at the Ministry of Education. In addition to the coronavirus, there is a very severe economic crisis, both for teachers, who are seeing the value of their salaries melt, and for families [la livre libanaise a plongé face au dollar et cette dépréciation se double d’une forte inflation], as well as the consequences of the double explosion in August at the port of Beirut. ” More than a hundred schools have in fact suffered minor or major destruction in the capital and its surroundings.
Many primary schoolchildren have not joined the benches of their establishment since February, on the eve of the first confinement. In the public or private sector (a sector attended by the majority of children), the past year had been heavily disrupted by the health crisis, as well as by the suspension of classes for a month, against a background of political instability. For this new academic year, everything has been chaotic since the start of the school year: local closures requiring the closure of schools, return postponed or canceled at the last moment …
Isolation is difficult for many young people. “We feel that some students no longer support distance education. They need experience, ground, contacts ”, notes Nayla Daoun, director of the Three Doctors religious school, an inclusive private establishment. Only children with specific needs and those in kindergarten had resumed, very briefly, the way to school, before the reconfinement. “We could see their joy when they took off their masks to eat, underlines Eva Maria Massoud, teacher. The social learning that we do at school – communicate, play… – is irreplaceable. The lack of interactions is very penalizing for children. ”
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