[Bangla Daily Star] Libya's 1.2 million schoolchildren returned to classrooms nationwide yesterday, to learn a revamped curriculum that includes the revolution that ousted Moamer Qadaffy and purges his personal teachings.The country's old textbooks have been revised to eliminate chapters that "glorified" Qadaffy with new material added on the nine-month conflict that led to his downfall and death, Education Minister Suleyman Ali al-Saheli told AFP.
"We will not repeat the same mistakes. Our children will study the entire conflict, including details of Qadaffy's death," Saheli said on the sidelines of an event marking the start of the national school year.
"For sure they will study what happened in Libya last year."
The bloody rebellion which erupted last February saw tens of thousands of Libyan men, backed by NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all....
forces, take up arms against Qadaffy, who was killed on October 20 following a conflict that left thousands of people dead.
Saheli said that during his four-decade regime, Qadaffy "distorted history" to cast himself in a favourable light.
"Libyan history was changed under him. Libya's genuine history was never taught," he told a gathering in the Ali Shams school in Tripoli's once-notorious Abu Salim neighbourhood.
Abu Salim was a former Qadaffy bastion that included an infamous prison where some political activists who opposed Qadaffy were held. Large swathes of the neighbourhood were reduced to rubble when Qadaffy diehards battled former rebels in August, in the days before Tripoli fell.
"Qadaffy's political teachings, military teachings and the subject of Al-Jamahiriya
... An Arabic neologism coined by the late and unlamented Muammar al-Qadaffy. The word jamahiriya was derived from jumhuriya, which is the usual Arabic translation of republic. It was coined by changing the component jumhur ‐
public‐ to its plural form, jamahir --
the masses. Thus, it is similar to the term People's Republic, only more denigrating to the actual inhabitants of the country...
are being dropped from the new curriculum," Saheli told the gathering of children, teachers and officials from the United Nations
...aka the Oyster Bay Chowder and Marching Society...
children's fund, Unicef.