Ahmad Hillis
Former Chief, Education Programme, Gaza Field

"Let me say that if there was a single thing that helped us during the last fifty years it was hope. Without hope you cannot attain anything. And we always stressed hope in the spirits of our children, in the spirits of the families. You can have good education if the family helps us as teachers, and if you support your child, then he or she will be something in the future. But without hope we [teachers] cannot give anything. We did not have a Palestinian government, UNRWA provided the education, and until 1967 Gaza was under Egyptian administration ...

During the Intifadah we had very long periods of curfews. The camps were kept under curfew for four to five weeks at a time. Schools were closed, everything was closed, and nobody was allowed to move in the streets. What do you do in this situation? We changed the textbooks into self-learning materials, sent these to the children under curfew, from one house to another, from one shelter to the other. The mothers who went down to the market to buy vegetables and food when the curfew was lifted for a few hours would carry the materials in their baskets. They would go to the schools and hand over the previous day's materials for correction and take the new materials back to their children at home. So the children got an education in spite of the curfews. I was called in many, many times by the Israeli authorities who wanted to put pressure on me to stop this. But I said: 'I am only doing my job as an education officer. If you can find any single word which is written against you, you can take me with you.' One time they called me in and said: 'We have to search you'. I said: 'OK, you do whatever you like'. So they strip searched me, and I had to stand in the room with no clothes on with two soldiers, and I said: 'What nonsense is this, what are you searching for? You know I am an education officer, and I have nothing.'

I remember a story from 1960s when President Abdel Nasser, during a visit to Damascus, was being briefed by government ministers. The Minister of Education said: 'We are suffering from low standards'. Abdel Nasser looked at him and said: 'I advise you to go to Gaza'. The minister was astonished: 'For what reason?' Abdel Nasser replied: 'The Palestinians down in Gaza are doing very well, because they believe in their work, and they have strong hopes for the future. So, go and visit Gaza and you will know how things are.' At least we succeeded in education; in other things we did not succeed. Unfortunately. Today, a lot of university students don't have any hope of finding a job in Gaza, and now they can't leave. But we still have hope that Gaza will reopen again.

The most important thing is education in its broadest meaning. Not in just learning the three arts, as they call it, or learning mathematics, languages or geography. You have to provide a systematic kind of upbringing for the children, to guide them and help them understand life, to think, because most of our children memorize facts which is not helpful at all. We want our children to learn critical thinking, to analyze things, to go deeper into a subject, not only to memorize a passage and then go to an examination. This is not education. The teacher should not be a 'lecturer', but the organizer of the children's work. The teacher should supervise and help whenever needed. If the pupils are just recording things, we are just producing tape recorders. "

Excerpts from an interview by Else Lidegaard (Danish Refugee Council technical expert)