It is self-explanatory that the war on Lebanon has affected extant education systems badly. For different providers in the country’s fragmented educational landscape – one that has long been flagged for “co-existence of multiple systems with sharply different quality levels” (2015 World Bank Lebanon systematic country diagnostic), the 2024-25 academic year was disrupted just as it was about to start or had barely begun.

Under the initial conflict shock, institutions at all levels of formal education were mandated by the Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEHE) to temporarily suspend operations from the first day of intensification of enemy attacks on September 23. An emergency response plan with a projected funding need of $25 million was devised by the ministry with UNESCO collaboration and presented on October 15 to international donors. The plan determined November 4 as the revised start of the academic year. Depending on circumstances, however, the closures of educational institutions extended for varying periods; for a few and privileged learners, schools opened in mid October but for many, access to education was periled deep into November.

With official estimates of affected students and teachers across Lebanon in the middle of the conflict exceeding 500,000 and 45,000, respectively, private primary and secondary schools from the first day saw irredeemable impacts of teachers being displaced and students being traumatized; public schools additionally were turned into shelters. Pupils were divided among the few with calm and relative safe remote learning environments and the technical means – devices and connectivity – to utilize online learning versus all the others who were displaced and/or disrupted on multiple vectors in their learning journey. 

Tertiary education institutions, at least those in the top tier of private universities, fared not totally as bad as other schools. Remote access to classes was easier to manage for universities than for schools. However, universities were in no way spared the traumas of losing students to war. Consequently, some lecturers were traveling and so were some students.

Care for the mental stability and health of students, lecturers, and staff became top priorities. Mental health support and provision of psycho-social services were entwined with material aid deliveries in a flood of volunteer aid that involved school managers and staff, nonprofit organizations, educators and learners on all levels. 

A critical assessment of the education emergency response mechanism by think tank The Lebanese Center for Policy Studies notes that previous experiences of education shocks, including wars, have not led to adoption of a law for education management in times of crisis. For analyst Carlos Naffah, the shock of the latest war underscores that this failing needs urgently to be remedied. He writes that “a draft law on education in emergencies” must be developed by the Ministry of Education and Higher Education and other stakeholders.  

Known and unknown quantities

Estimates of the conflict’s economic cost and recovery cost dimensions in education are far more elusive than those of sectors in economic life where impacts are immediate and visible or can be projected over months and years instead of having to be calculated in decades. A material war impact analysis in the World Bank Interim Damage and Loss Assessment (DaLA), published in mid-November, apportioned to the education sector economic losses of $215 million from October 7, 2023 to Sep 27, 2024.

These losses were described as tuition losses at private schools (92 percent of assumed losses, mainly in the first term of the current academic year) and cost of temporary schooling arrangements, a ballpark estimate of $75 per learner for roughly half of the report’s estimated 450,000 displaced students during the fall term of 2024. Irrespective of the fragility of estimates constructed under duress of an at the time unended conflict, the combined amount of tuition and operational losses is a paltry projection equivalent to 4 percent of the World Bank’s entire (also by definition incomplete) economic loss estimates for Lebanon that according to DaLA stood at $5.1 billion for the assessed period  (in addition to $3.4 billion in estimated damages, which is the immediate and blatant visible impact).

Notably, DaLA provided no estimate on damages to schools during the war because of few such reports having been received. But even with the caveats of covering only the first week of full Israeli aggression and not imagining future losses of earning power, the $215 million economic losses estimate for education appears at best rudimentary. This is not only because losses were estimated at a time when the end of the open war was not yet is sight but also in the sense that the estimate does neither hint at the dimensions of long-term impacts on the provision of more egalitarian education and creation of vital human capital (which in some other World Bank papers had been described as the country’s greatest asset when human capital is contextualized with natural, financial, and physical or constructed capital) nor addresses with a single word the value, quantity, and quality of the contributions which educational entities make to Lebanese GDP. 

Lastly, notwithstanding the DaLA’s cautionary statement that economic losses are to be expected over many coming years in the education sector due to lost future earnings and development impact but are outside of its scope of war impact assessment, the paltry $215 million partial estimate of economic losses in education pales possibly even more when compared to 12-month economic losses in agriculture and commerce ($1.13 billion to Sep 27 and $1.67 billion to Oct 27, respectively) and damages in the property realm (82 percent of the total damages estimate as of Oct 27).

Towering contradictions cast their shadows over future education

The challenge of valuing Lebanese education economically is juxtaposed with the high value that society attributes to education, as shown in private households’ strong funding allocation to their children’s education despite a comparatively low return on human capital in the Lebanese economy. The contradictions that are embedded into the private financing environment of schooling are moreover exacerbated by the weakness of local research into the sector’s economic importance.

Paucity of data on the direct, indirect, and induced GDP contributions of Lebanon’s primary, secondary, and tertiary education providers is endemic. Some promising but isolated studies, such as the Lebanese American University’s 2017 investigation of LAU’s economic contributions at Beirut and Byblos campuses, have yet to be followed and widened. Plus, the shock of becoming victims of asymmetrical conflict escalations has not been conducive for researching far-flung implications of war on Lebanese education.

Still, preliminary analyses or “rapid assessment” exercises were attempted already during the time of high conflicts and displacement. For example, a stakeholder survey of 18 local nonprofit organizations in the education field was conducted by humanitarian and development sector-focused consultancy 360 Consulting, and commissioned by NGO Lebanese International Financial Executives (LIFE). 360 Consulting found, to no sentient stakeholder’s shock, that “the Ministry of Education and Higher Education faces challenges in ensuring quality education for all students, especially displaced ones.”

The stakeholder consultations further revealed that “a wide range of initiatives” had emerged within a few weeks from the start of open warfare and sought to reach displaced students through flexible learning approaches and offer psycho-social support but were handicapped by operational barriers and absence of stakeholder trust in the Lebanese government. According to the consultants, urgent needs and long-term needs have to be addressed in equal measure, from short-term financing, technical and mental health support to ramping up the involvement of communities in education and the ongoing investment in capacity building of teachers. 

Beginning with a comment in the World Bank DaLa and a reference in the above cited paper by 360 Consulting, it is widely recognized that the war shock has disrupted Lebanese education stakeholders, recipients and providers, at a time of historic fragility.

Economic restraints had already been weighing on public schools and teacher salaries in the early 2010s when spatial crowding of classrooms and challenges of addressing the schooling needs of refugee children were reflected in diverging school achievements as described in international assessments.

Farther along the same worrying trend of widening inequalities, the just published 2024 World Bank systematic country diagnostic – an analytical exercise that is a prerequisite for a presentation of a country partnership framework (CPF) to the World Bank board – cites PISA outcomes of 2018 and 19 for documenting the juxtaposition of a few high-performing schools with many low-performing schools, as well as huge downside gaps equal to more than six years of education attainment in reading scores between highest and lowest scoring schools.

All indications since point to further weakening equality in an already unequal system. Pandemic lockdowns and then the economic meltdown’s cost pressures culminated in the war of 2024 as the peak of problems that forced schools to hike tuition and parents to switch schools or even forego enrolling their children in schools that were acceptable.

Historically, Lebanese annual state expenditure on education has been eclipsed by private tuition spending, which was strongly reflected in knowledge attainment advantages in private schools. However, the onset of the economic crisis years in 2019-20 saw the ratio of private school attendance drop five percentage points and losses in effective years of learning per student have mounted in the two following years.

Combined with the deterioration of governmental financing and institutional guidance capacities due to erosion of fiscal revenues and public sector human capital, the pre-crisis inequality in the education sector is by many indicators on the increase. The World Bank’s latest Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) warns for example that the human capital index ranking of Lebanon has fallen below world average and suboptimal human capital generation of Lebanon today could cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars annually “in the coming decades”.

Shattered hopes for the current academic year

When Executive started inquiring about expectations for the coming academic year in the summer, educators and school administrators were just beginning to hope that the 2024-25 academic year would bring a gradual recovery of lost quality and peaceful learning after a period of intense pressures. This hope was shattered at least in the short term and pushed aside by the prospect of further losses in effective learning years by students of all cohorts.

Nonetheless, the war shock of victimization felt all across society’s multiple education systems enforces the realization that the stretched fabric of the Lebanese education sector is woven not so much in the way of an organized system of state-funded institutions with government-designed curricula and uniform pedagogic aims but rather comprised of a myriad of aspirations of diverse stakeholders.

On the upside of the dismal lens of education goals related to social justice, the response to the war shock suffered by all strata in society has thus inversely become a renewed testimony to educational aspirations even as the public sector constraints appear more severe than ever.

Defying defeatism

Like the education institutions that exist in Lebanon in large diversity, the societal investments into the next generation span from profoundly religious to convinced secular. They entail voluntary and non-tax based financial support efforts consisting of remittances to extended family members as well as fundraising contributions.

The human energy behind people-power efforts to keep the torches of education burning brightly is all the more visible against the darkness of the war, albeit with the strong caveat that no amount of private interest and volunteer giving can substitute for state capacity and public policy. As such, the citizen-driven education support is neither conducive to quantitative analysis nor appears geared toward a universal education model of egalitarian dreams. What makes it important, is the intensity and quality of grass-roots familial support efforts, the determination of civil networks that are mostly away from the limelight, and positive views on Lebanese education held by stakeholders. 

When asked about the value that they attribute to and have personally derived from their education journeys in periods that were never entirely unscathed by external disruptions, leading members of non-governmental network Lebanese International Financial Executives  – archetypal members of the successful Lebanese diaspora – respond unequivocally that the secrets that made them succeed as entrepreneurs in foreign economic environments were to a large part comprised of the education and values they had been imbued with in their home country.

“When you are [living in] the diaspora, you feel that this is really what made you,” says Zeina Farhat, managing director of LIFE, attributing the successes of Lebanese like herself to a combination of personal upbringing, and a large contribution of their families’ investments into their higher education. “That is key to who we have become,” she says and affirms, “We who are supporting education in Lebanon have a very positive perception of the level of education that we have in the country.”

Not at all a statistic

The truth of the Lebanese education sector, as far as one can claim for truth to be a valid human construct, is in a huge diversity of stories that in many instances show the polar opposites of being faced with extreme circumstances caused by both systemic and unforeseeable issues on one hand and celebrating a uniquely human aspiration and love for knowledge on the other. These are stories that journalism can only capture in the tiniest dosages of serendipitous encounter.

Hala and Wajdi are middle-aged educators and colleagues to one another. I meet them by coincidence in an urban intermediate school in Beirut. As teachers, they are the first people you expect to meet in a school, and I am glad to learn that they work as education professionals imparting on their early-teen pupils knowledge in the oft-lauded STEM realm, biology and physics. Their names can be interpreted as the Arabic terms standing for beauty and passion.

But the encounter with Hala and Wajdi today, a Thursday in the first half of November, in a narrow hallway set up as makeshift teachers’ lounge, comes with two incredible twists.

Firstly, their students are not in their classrooms but attend remotely and the two teachers say that they have recently started conducting virtual lessons. About one week after the – by war and displacement deferred – beginning of the academic year 2024-25 on November 4, both science teachers started conducting online lessons. Neither has access to laptop computers – Wajdi’s machine was destroyed in an airstrike – and so they teach from their mobile phones.

Their students are attending class from home, or from refugee shelters where they have been forced to live as internally displaced people (IDPs) after their hometowns and villages have been targeted by aerial destruction. Many students at best have access only to low-end smartphones, or not even those. As many of her pupils lack devices or connectivity to such a large degree, she has resorted to sending them pdf images of lesson materials, not files, Hala tells Executive.

In the second twist of vicious fate forced upon them by Israel’s war on Lebanon, both teachers have no choice but to conduct virtual classes despite the evident paucity of online classrooms under such circumstances. That is because it is not only their students who are unable to come to class. The two teachers, and their families, are refugees themselves, forced to shelter as displaced people in their own workplace. Their own high school and university-age children have taken refuge in their textbooks but having no laptop computers, they cannot follow classes themselves, even online.

Still, they consider themselves comparatively lucky and would not want to be moved to the uncertain environment of another shelter, such as a container village. During their stay at the school and counting among the 20 percent of internally displaced refugees who were quickly registered with the UNHCR, the school’s director, supported by Hala, Wajdi, and others, succeeded in keeping order among the 37 families with a total of 125 members who were sheltering in the facility. All were well provided with essentials such as meals, water, and electricity, but deprived of specific supplies for individual medical needs and elements that are bare necessities for a normal life of dignity. And yet they self-organize their existence in a shelter of the greatest order, mutual support, good cheer, and with moments of laughter. 

Built upon such excellent personal experiences, it seems that education support is woven into the organizational DNA of LIFE. Although or perhaps exactly because it presents a larger spectrum of financial experience and business minds than some other advocacy-for-change agents in Lebanese civil society, LIFE from inception in 2009, “was born with the willingness of investing in education,” Farhat elaborates.

According to her, the NGO was conceived 15 years ago in the realm of financial expertise, where Lebanese born achievers are dispersed all over the world. The founding idea was seeking to bring structure into the Lebanese diaspora through its professional network but from the moment of its formation, LIFE began engaging in education grants for deserving students and employment support of grantees as the organization’s first fundraising focus and “other mission” than strengthening its own network. “Prosperity and social mobility are at the core of what we are doing. [Our currently] 1,400 members around the world are contributing to education of human capital as the only asset that we have in Lebanon,” Farhat says.

Lara Koro, the organization’s director of Nurture, adds that the LIFE scholarship program is distinguished by “the way that we want to nurture and empower the future generation and provide them with access to education and employability.” Farhat and Koro explain that the worsening condition of the Lebanese economic fabric motivated LIFE in 2019 to redirect its scholarship focus away from students who enrolled in post-graduate programs at prestigious international universities and henceforth allocate 80 percent of its education budget to students based in Lebanon.

Since its inception, the scholarship program has invested $16.5 million in education. It supported more than 1100 individuals and the pool of supported students has grown from a mere two students in the first iteration to several hundred in each academic year, Koro says, adding how the ethos of the LIFE network extends into its scholarship program: “by supporting students, we will have them support other students in the future.”

“We have grown seven-fold in the last three to four years and have a pool of over 400 students for this [academic] year of 2024-25, of whom 75 percent are based in Lebanon“, she adds. According to Koro, the program has resulted in ca 200 new graduates annually, in Lebanon and abroad, in each of the past few years. “Seventy-five percent of the students who are graduating [locally] with support by LIFE are finding opportunities in Lebanon,” Farhat emphasizes. According to a media statement, the fundraising efforts of 2024 yielded $2.1 million for education, with 432 beneficiaries. Additionally, a Lebanese Education Emergency Fund was launched in partnership with US-based NGO LebNet.

While a prominent one, the example of LIFE’s dedication to education made in Lebanon is only one image in the multi-faceted picture of civil society support for education and this picture in turn is only one stone in the mosaic of a society that is deeply attached to their identities, to which education is a historic value-added. In the people’s show of resilience through solidarity and their open defiance of the inhumane victimization of normal villages, which hundreds of thousands have demonstrated through immediate mass returns to their battered hometowns and villages after November 26 of this year, the ten weeks of war and invasion have reinforced the mental idea or utopia of Lebanon.

The astounding scope and width of the solidary efforts made during the open war cannot be adequately captured through anecdotal journalism or a bird’s eye analytical lens. Macroeconomic and political contexts in the region, under assumptions of which the viability of scenarios for Lebanon has been circumscribed, have been thrown into the grinder of conflict politics. The 2024 SCD paper acknowledged the two overarching constraints, the second and constant of which was the “turbulent regional and international environment” (the other was “institutional paralysis” – in 2015, this constraint was fashionably labeled “elite capture”).

This fundamentally external constraint of regional conflicts has become a black hole for any planning and modeling of realistic regional futures, let alone Lebanese ones, which means that this country is once again exiled into a wasteland of merely imagined economic opportunities and reforms. Neither a “muddling through” nor a “recovery” scenario – the two options envisioned in the production of the 2024 World Bank systematic country diagnostic – is a plausible recipe for addressing the confluence of new challenges that will determine the framework of Lebanese needs and development priorities over the coming five years.

As a sector whose constraints are co-determined by the region’s proneness for conflict, the evidence of the past in conjunction with a look at the state’s financial and human resources suggests that the fiscal and operational obstacles to education reform in Lebanon will be enlarged beyond their already overpowering intensity of the past five years. However, at the same time education will be further heightened in importance for private households and stakeholders in almost all productive sectors.

On the bottom line of the equation, advantages of those with a top-level education will be at least as impressive as they were in the decades of reconstruction and development after 1990, yet egalitarian education ideals may be pushed back farther versus human capital generation that, in a Middle Eastern post-conflict environment, might effectively be empowering a reliable regional development elite that is rooted in Lebanon.