The focus has to shift from transferring knowledge to building students’ skills and providing them with critical and analytical tools to make any ideology they encounter subject to examination and scrutiny.

Education is highly valued in Israel, as Jeffrey Geri’s book Israel – Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture will tell you. As such, primary and secondary schooling is free and compulsory up until the last year of secondary school, with most lessons taught in Hebrew or Arabic. The literacy rate is 91.75 per cent, according to UNESCO, and expenditure on educational institutions as a percentage of the gross national product is above the average of member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Amid the revolutionary fervour sweeping the Arab world, Jordan has gone largely unnoticed. This is despite the country going through the longest public sector strike in its recent history, disrupting schooling for more than 1.5 million students.

The protest was met with a harsh police response. According to reports, tear gas was used to control the protesters. Footage and images showing police violence flooded social media. A total of 50 teachers were detained but later released.

Figures from 2018 show that the number of students in primary schools learning Tamazight has increased from 500,000 the previous year to 600,000 students across 4,200 primary schools. A better focus on teaching the language could help limit the number of children who fail school because their first language is Tamazight rather than Arabic.

Following independence, the state raised the banner of democratic education and promoted it throughout the country and across all social groups. A decade after independence, all levels of education – primary, secondary and higher – became free and available for all Algerians.

Despite this growth, education in Sudan faces many challenges, most prominent of which is the high number of dropouts. Although the current constitution provides that the state will guarantee free and mandatory primary education, statistics indicate that only 76 percent of primary school-aged children go to school and 28 percent of secondary school-aged children do. According to information published in 2007, the illiteracy rate in Sudan was 50 percent among women and 30 percent among men. However, last year, the government announced that overall illiteracy had dropped to 24 percent.

Access to education remains just as perilous for Libyan children four years later. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) revealed that 489 schools were affected by violence in the first seven months of 2018. At least 260,000 students experienced obstacles to accessing an education as a result. Despite the conflict, literacy rates remain high in Libya, standing at nearly 91 per cent as of 2015. However, this figure might not be accurate due to the difficulty in conducting a nationwide census.

Madrasas generally taught calculation, grammar, poetry, history and above all the Qur’an and sacred law. At a higher level they taught literary subjects and arithmetic. While memorization of texts was emphasized, personal instruction, lectures and imitation of the teacher by students were also held to be crucial to minimize errors in religious understanding.

There are around 2.5 million Syrian children displaced by the war living in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. Host countries have taken steps to increase school enrollment, such as offering free public education and introducing ‘second shifts’ in the afternoons to accommodate more children. Yet barriers such as onerous documentation requirements, language difficulties and a lack of affordable transportation are continuing to keep children out of the classroom, according to HRW.