Stateless Democracy

from public life; teaching it was illegal and could be
punished by imprisonment and even torture. So when
the Syrian Kurds took their communities into their own
hands, they immediately set up Kurdish language instruction.
The first such school to open was Şehîd Fewzî’s
School in Afrîn canton, followed by one each in Kobanê
and Cizîre. By August 2014, Cizîre alone had 670 schools
with 3,000 teachers offering Kurdish language courses to
49,000 students.
On 8 December, the delegation visited Rojava’s first
and only institution of higher education, the Mesopotamia
Academy for Social Sciences in Qamişlo. The Assad
regime had permitted no such institutions in the Kurdish
areas; this one opened in September 2014 and is still very
much under construction.
Teaching and discussions are mostly in Kurdish, although
the sources are often in Arabic, since many essential
texts have not yet been translated into Kurdish.
We met with several members of the administration and
faculty, including the rector, Rojda Firat, and teachers Adnan
Hasan, Dorşîn Akîf, Medya Doz, Mehmod Kalê, Murat
Tolhildan, Serhat Mosis, and Xelîl Hussein.
One challenge the academy faces, they told us, is that
people in northeastern Syria think they have to go abroad
to get a good education. “We want to change that,” said
one instructor, dismissing it as a notion instilled by hegemonic
forces. “We don’t want people to feel inferior about
where they live. In the Middle East there is a huge amount
of knowledge and wisdom, and we are trying to uncover it.
Many things that have happened in history happened here.”
The school year consists of three terms, each lasting
three to four months, progressing from overviews of
subjects to specialization to final projects. The curriculum
comprises mainly history and sociology. “Why those subjects?,”
we asked. “They are crucial,” we were told. Under
the regime, “our existence [as Kurds] was disputed. We are
trying to show that we exist and have made many sacrifices
along the way… We consider ourselves part of history,
subjects of history.” The instruction seeks to “uncover histories
of peoples that have been denied… to create a new
life to overcome the years and centuries of enslavement of
thought that have been imposed on people.” Ultimately its
purpose is “to write a new history.”
The sociology curriculum takes a critical stance toward
twentieth-century positivism and instead seeks to develop
a new, alternative social science for the twenty-first century,
what Abdullah Öcalan calls a “sociology of freedom.” For
their final projects, students choose a particular social problem,
then research it and write a thesis on how to resolve it,
in connection with this alternative. So the learning is practical
as well as intellectual, intended to serve a social good.
Unlike conventional Western approaches, the academy’s
pedagogy rejects the unidirectional transmission of facts.
Indeed it doesn’t strictly separate teachers and students.
Teachers learn from students and vice versa; ideally,
through intersubjective discourse, they come to shared
conclusions. Nor are the instructors necessarily professors;
they are people whose life experience has given them
insights that they can impart. One teacher, for example,
recounts folk tales once a week. “We want teachers to
help us understand the meaning of life,” we were told. “We
focus on giving things meaning, being able to interpret and
comment as well as analyze.”
Students take exams, but those exams don’t measure
knowledge — they’re “more like reminders, like dialogues.”
And teachers themselves are subject to evaluation by
students. “You did not explain this very well,” a student
can say. A teacher who is criticized has to talk out the issue
with the student until they both feel they understand
each other.
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