International Higher Education, Winter 2000

The University Education of Syrian Engineers

This article examines instruction and learning at the university-level in Syria pertaining to the training of civil engineers. The material presented is drawn from data collected in the early 1990s in the course of research for my doctoral dissertation.

French and Syrian Curricula
The above study compared the training of civil engineers in Syria and in France in two institutional settings--Damascus University and the ENSAIS (Ecole nationale supérieure des arts et industries de Strasbourg). The data reported below relate to Damascus University. It is striking that while curricula are similar in both institutions (with the exception of computer sciences and law and, to a certain extent, the technology of construction), instructional methods differ in two major respects:
 

• The instruction is based on theoretical training. It is characterized by the virtual absence of vocational or technical education. Appropriate laboratory facilities are either unavailable or underutilized. The university does not maintain ties with either the public or private sector. As a result, students do not have opportunities for practical training.
• Some 85 percent of the lecturers did not assign their students any readings from the professional literature and confined their teaching to the lecture format. Only a minority of them encouraged students to look at issues outside the classroom. This state of affairs is largely a consequence of policies of Arabization and problems related to the inadequate availability of Arabic textbooks.

Politics of Arabization
University textbooks are often translated into Arabic without any mention of the original source and without any bibliographical references. In fact, producing textbooks for the university is part of the extensive policies of Arabization. Although Syria often boasts at regional and Arabic conferences of its capacity to provide "Arabized" sciences, in engineering the science produced shows mixed results at best and in some cases disastrous outcomes.

Arabization aims to make knowledge accessible to all strata of the population, not just to small a "colonial" elite. Nevertheless, in the case of engineering education, Arabization policies produce professionals handicapped by the scarcity of translated books. Further, engineers experience great difficulty in remaining professionally up-to-date. As a result, the Arabization of the sciences, while promoting an agenda of "decolonization," paradoxically reinforces Syria's dependence on the former colonial countries in terms of the engineering sciences and technological know-how. This problem may go unsolved given the limited financial resources of scientific institutions in Syria and in the Arab world in general.

Arabization policies are not specific to Syria. Yet, the paradigm behind the politics of Arabization in such countries as Syria and Algeria is the substitution of foreign languages (French, English) with Arabic. By contrast, the Tunisian experience is somewhat different as the state imposes Arabic only on certain parts of the curriculum. At the same time, Tunisian students must be proficient in French, and sometimes even in English, to remain current with foreign sources and textbooks. Syrian university officials perceive such policies to be rather "schizophrenic" in their effects.

Conclusion
Finally, I am aware that instructional methods in Syrian universities cannot be separated from other general higher education issues--such as, material and financial capabilities, admissions policies, and the imbalance between the huge number of students in a "mass" public system and the small number of faculty. Furthermore, university and faculty libraries are poorly endowed, and there are always difficulties in obtaining foreign publications. This article has attempted to cover problems not directly related to financial capabilities but rather to the underlying educational philosophy in Syrian higher education.