German schools face testing time with influx of Syrian children
Education the number one priority for many refugees arriving in Germany
To hear their Syrian parents tell it, Yasser and Taha, age six and nine, were the driving force behind the family’s decision to make an arduous overland trek across half of Europe to reach safety in Germany.
“School for them, a good education – that is the most important thing there could ever be for me,” says the boys’ father, Zaid Taha, a businessman from the contested Syrian city of Aleppo. He led his family’s exodus after a barrel bomb fell near their home, killing next-door neighbours.
“Education, that’s their life,” he says, laying one hand on each boy’s head. “That’s my goal. That’s my heart.”
An enormous influx of migrants and refugees – 20,000 people crossing into Germany last weekend alone – comes only days before the September 15 start of the new school year. And educators acknowledge it will be a struggle to accommodate the young arrivals, many of them disoriented and bewildered after a dangerous journey, and by the shocks of wartime life preceding it.
Syria’s ferocious four-year conflict has disrupted schooling for millions of children, and parents who are among the current wave of asylum seekers from there – many of them professionals from highly educated, middle-class backgrounds – are determined to make up for lost ground and lost time.
