“Iraq is a third world country”

Major K, based in Iraq, has a pretty sanguine take on the state of education in Iraq.

In the USA, we take literacy for granted. Here it is a mark of distinction. A bachelor’s degree here carries the same clout as a PhD in the USA. US Officers are required to have a bachelor’s and US Colonels have at least a Master’s Degree. Here, a high school diploma is the bar over which you must pass to become an officer. In the US Army, it has been the basic requirement to become a soldier. (They don’t have GED’s here.) The result is that many Iraqi Soldiers are illiterate. Special skill training classes are sometimes hard to fill, not because of a shortage of soldiers or recruits, but because of a shortage of ones that can read and write basic Arabic. I spent some time today showing an Iraqi Lieutenant Colonel how to transfer a file from one computer to another using a flash memory stick and then how to send an e-mail. I have been using e-mail for over 10 years. Teaching staff officers how to do elementary computer work is almost a daily occurrence here. All of this being said, Iraq has one of the most educated populations in the region, so you can easily imagine what it is like in other countries in the middle east.

Read more.

The “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality in the media stops us from hearing these first hand accounts, which are great. But is Major K right that Iraq is the best-educated in the region? We were repeatedly told this before the invasion by supporters and opponents of taking out Saddam. But I checked out the CIA factbook and was stunned to see otherwise.

• LITERACY RATES (aged 15 and above can read)
• Jordan: 91.3%
• Kuwait: 83.5%
• Iran: 79.4% (right, it’s not Arab, but even so…)
• Saudi Arabia: 78.8%
• Syria: 76.9%
• Tunisia: 74.3%
• Algeria: 70%
• Egypt: 57.7%
• Morocco: 51.7%
• Yemen: 50.2%
• Iraq: 40.4%

People also made fantastic arguments that women’s literacy was higher in Iraq. That’s a total joke—the female literacy rate in Iraq is a horrendous 24.4%! How did this garbage get propogated? The saying in the Arab world apparently used to go: “Egypt writes, Lebanon prints, and Iraq reads.” Maybe back in the 1960s, but that’s sure not the case today. How did such nonsense get perpetrated?

UPDATE: Other sources define literacy as those “aged 25 and over who can read.” That apparently pushes the literacy rate up to 58%. That’s still lower than all of its neighbors save Yemen and Morocco (which would in-turn be higher if the literacy rate was redefined).

UPDATE II: Brian P. Golden, writing in the Boston Globe, has the answer:

While Saddam Hussein’s policies devastated education in the 1990s, older Iraqis grew up in one of the most literate countries in the Middle East. They can produce goods and services and run businesses.

Another reason for taking out the Baathist regime. The country was once highly literate. Now Saddam is gone, it can be again.