Angelina Jolie Made the Case for Refugee Education in a Powerful Op-Ed
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- Published on Wednesday, 30 November -0001 00:00
- Written by Teen Vogue
She said it's "how you rebuild a country."
Actress and activist Angelina Jolie penned a powerful essay published by CNN on the Syrian refugee crisis, which she called “a major challenge for our generation.”But, she argued, finding a solution to the crisis is not hopeless. She says education is the key to rebuilding war-torn countries and building up refugees to their fullest potential.“We often talk about refugees as a single mass of people, a burden,” Jolie wrote, saying we do not see refugees as individuals with goals and potential. But she said many young refugees aspire to work and study hard, contribute to society, and eventually help their homelands. “[Education], in the end, I thought, is how you rebuild a country: not with peace agreements and resolutions, as necessary as those are, but with millions of school report cards, exams passed, qualifications obtained, jobs acquired, and young lives turned to good purpose rather than spent languishing in camps,” Jolie wrote.Syria has been ravaged by civil war since March 2011. According to the UNHCR, the U.N. Refugee Agency, over 10 million Syrian people have been displaced during the war’s seven years — like Hussin, who fled with her family to Jordan when she was only 12 years old.Jolie said meeting two young Syrian refugee women with “contrasting lives” helped her to come to this conclusion.One, she said, put aside her dream of becoming a doctor in order to help raise her siblings when her mother was killed in an airstrike and her father was separated from his children. At 14, the woman married and became a mother. The Freedom Fund has found that many young refugee women have been forced into childhood marriage in order to avoid extreme poverty.“Even if the war ended tomorrow, she has been robbed of her childhood and the future she might have had,” Jolie wrote.
The other young refugee fled from Syria to Iraq alongside her family when she was 16. She enrolled in an Iraqi school, and is now studying at an Iraqi university to become a dentist. Jolie wrote that the woman told her she hopes to eventually return to Syria to help her homeland.With global conflicts outlasting entire childhoods, Jolie wrote that countries are “losing out on an entire generation of education and skills amongst its young people” — something she called a “tragedy.”“Conversely, investing in the education of refugees is the most powerful way we can help them to be self-sufficient, and contribute to the future stability of countries torn apart by conflict,” she wrote.Jolie, of course, is not the only one fiercely advocating to educate young refugee women. Perhaps most famously, Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for her advocacy for young Pakistani women’s education — even after being shot in the head for her work. And in Syria, refugee Muzoon Almellehan is referred to as “the Malala of Syria” for her refugee education advocacy.“We need education, because Syria needs us,” the then 18-year-old Muzoon said at the United Nations in 2016.Jolie concluded her essay by calling for curriculums to be established for refugee children in primary and secondary school so they are more prepared to pursue college. She also called for wealthier nations to “address humanitarian funding shortfalls so refugee parents don't have to choose between food and schooling for their children.”
You can read Jolie’s full essay here.
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