Around 14,000 teachers who were dismissed from their jobs for taking part in the revolution against the ousted Assad regime will be reinstated, Syria’s Education Minister Mohammad Abdel Rahman Turko said Monday.
Turko made the announcement during remarks to the People’s Assembly, Syria’s parliament, according to the state-run news agency SANA, saying a plan to permanently reinstate the teachers had reached its final stages and would soon be referred to the assembly for approval.
The move is part of a wider effort to overhaul Syria’s education system after decades of Baathist rule, when schools and textbooks promoted regime ideology.
"It’s great that these thousands of teachers who were sacked for opposing Assad are being reinstated, that’s a good thing," political commentator Robin Yassin-Kassab told The New Arab.
The regime of longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad, which witnessed a dramatic collapse in December 2024 following a lightning rebel offensive, used extensive repression to punish Syrians who took part in protests against it.
Hundreds of thousands of people were detained or killed by the regime, and many more lost their jobs.
The Syrian conflict grew out of anti-regime protests in March 2011 that were violently suppressed by Assad’s forces. The war drew in several foreign armies and militant groups, killing more than 500,000 people – according to conservative estimates – and leaving much of the country in ruins.
Turko said reinstated teachers would be entitled to work at the school closest to their place of residence. He also said top university graduates would be appointed as teachers without having to sit for a competitive exam, with lists of their names expected to be issued within days.
Dismantling Baathist education
Yassin-Kassab said the reinstatement of teachers was part of a broader transformation of Syria’s education system under the new government.
The ministry has removed the "Qawmiya" or nationalist education subject from the curriculum, he said, describing it as a heavily propagandistic subject designed to promote Baathist ideology.
"The new education ministry has gotten rid of the Qawmiya subject in school – which everybody hated so much – [it] was very propagandistic, and it was all designed to indoctrinate people in Baathist propaganda," he said.
Other propaganda material had also been removed from school textbooks, he added.
Corporal punishment has also been officially banned in schools, although Yassin-Kassab said it remained unclear how consistently the ban was being enforced.
"Corporal punishment has officially been banned in schools, which is great," he said. "I don’t know how much of that is being observed, or how little it’s being observed, but it’s great that it’s now being recognised as a problem."
During a debate in parliament on Monday, however, some lawmakers said they supported corporal punishment, while others argued that it made students afraid to go to school.
Another lawmaker complained that there were too many women working in schools, saying he opposed the "feminisation" of education.
Turko reiterated his outright rejection of corporal punishment.
The lawmakers' comments drew criticism from many Syrians on social media, who accused them of being disconnected from reality.
The overhaul is also stirring debate on long-standing questions over minority languages.
Kurdish-language education in particular remains controversial, with many Kurds in northeast Syria seeking greater access to education in their native language.
Yassin-Kassab said he sympathised with Kurdish demands for children to be educated in their mother tongue, while noting that the availability of Kurdish-language education in Kurdish-majority areas would nevertheless represent a significant departure from the Baathist era.
"That was of course completely banned under the Baathist education system," he said.
Balancing old and new
The changes to education are taking place amid a broader debate over what should replace the ideological framework that dominated Syria’s public institutions under Assad.
"Education is one of the areas where this kind of push and pull is happening between secularists and Islamists," Yassin-Kassab said.
He said some secular Syrians were concerned that Baathist ideology could be replaced by Islamist interpretations that might affect how certain subjects, including science, are taught.
The debate extends beyond education to the wider restructuring of Syria’s public sector, including the dismissal of workers associated with the former regime.
The new government has said that some employees linked to the Assad regime were effectively on the state payroll without having proper jobs. But Yassin-Kassab said there were also concerns that some dismissed workers had held legitimate positions, with some members of Syria’s Alawi community feeling they had been unfairly or disproportionately targeted.
The issue remains controversial as the new authorities attempt to dismantle the structures of the Assad era while rebuilding state institutions.
Rebuilding Syria’s schools
On curriculum development, Turko said the ministry had completed the national standards for developing new curricula six months ago. The standards are currently before parliament, and work on drafting the new curricula will begin once they are approved.
The minister expects the number of students to reach six million this year, up from 5.3 million last year and 4.3 million before the fall of the former regime.
According to the figures he cited, the expected increase is 700,000 students compared with last year, or around 13.2 percent.
Turko attributed the rise to "the return of refugees and students who had dropped out returning to school," adding that accommodating the growing number of students was among the challenges facing the ministry.
He estimated that around two million students had dropped out of school, citing economic and social factors, as well as a lack of schools in some areas, among the reasons for the high dropout rate.