When I took charge of Lebanon's Ministry of Education and Higher Education in February 2014, I was presented with two huge challenges. In addition to improving the management and quality of Lebanon's public education system, I had to determine how to handle the unprecedented influx of refugees from Syria — around half a million of them children.
One possibility would have been to focus solely on providing education to Lebanese children — thereby upholding our country's long-held status as an important intellectual center in the Middle East — and to outsource the refugee problem to the international community. After all, Lebanon has already done far more than many other countries, accepting well over a million Syrian refugees despite the intense pressure on the local population and economy.
Instead, I took the view that, as long as these children are on Lebanese soil, we have a responsibility to provide them with a quality education in a structured environment so that when they can finally return to Syria they will have the skills and knowledge with which to rebuild their country. The greater risk, I felt, would have been to leave these children sitting idle, losing their hopes and aspirations, or, worse, being forced into child labor or drawn in by radical ideologies.