Sati' Al-Husri - Career As An Educationalist

Career As An Educationalist

In 1900, he graduated from the Royal Academy, and worked as a schoolteacher in Yanina in Epirus, then part of the European territories of the Ottoman Empire. During this period, he began to show an interest in questions of nationality and was exposed to the competing strands of European nationalism. After five years in Yanina, he took up a high-ranking administrative position in Macedonia, where the officers who would later form the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) had a strong presence. After the Young Turk revolution of 1908, he was appointed in May 1909 director of the Teachers' Institute, Darülmuallimin in Istanbul, where he initiated major reforms in pedagogy and the public education system. In this period he became editor of two important educational reviews ("Tedrisat-ı İbtidaiye Mecmuası", "Muallim"). From 1910 to 1912, he visited European countries to examine modern educational methods. Initially a supporter of Ottomanism and the Young Turks, from 1916 on he moved towards Arabism.

The Ottoman government granted al-Husri the post of director-general of education in the Syria Province at the beginning of World War I in 1914. In 1919, after the establishment of an independent Arab state in Syria under Faisal, al-Husri moved to Damascus where he was appointed Director General of Education, and later Minister of Education.

Al-Husri followed Faisal to Iraq in 1920 after the French imposed their mandate on Syria, and from 1921 to 1927 held the position of Director of General Education. In addition to other positions, he subsequently held the post of head of the Higher Teachers' Training College until 1937. During these years he played an influential role in promoting Arab nationalism through the educational system, and brought in teachers from Syria and Palestine to teach Arabic history and culture. According to Malik Mufti, his "chief accomplishment was to inculcate into the political and military elites of the country a permanent commitment to the vision of a strong and integrated Iraq destined one day to lead the entire Arab world."

In 1941 nationalist army officers, from the first generation to have come under the influence of al-Husri's ideas, carried out a coup d'état against the pro-British monarchy and government, briefly installing a pro-Axis regime under Rashid Ali al-Gailani. When British forces restored the monarchy, al-Husri was deported as were over a hundred of the Syrian and Palestinian teachers he had induced to come to Iraq.

Al-Husri's next major enterprise was the reform of the educational system in Syria. In 1943 the newly-elected Syrian president Shukri al-Kuwatli invited him to Damascus, then still under the French mandate, to draw up a new curriculum along Arab nationalist lines for the country's secondary education system. Al-Husri established a curriculum informed by his nationalist ideas which considerably reduced the French cultural element and broke away from the French educational model. Against the bitter opposition of the French, and the reservations of various political figures, the new curriculum was introduced in December 1944, but the sudden change caused confusion and shortages of the new schoolbooks did nothing to improve its reception. A year later, the former curriculum was restored.

In 1947, al-Husri moved to Cairo, taking up a position in the Cultural Directorate of the League of Arab States. He would remain there for 18 years, during which he produced most of his works. He returned to Baghdad in 1965, and died there in December 1968.