The Education System is a Guarantee of National Security Elements for the Country

Experts in national security affairs agree that one of the goals of national security is to protect the homeland and the people from all threats. One of the components of national security is the educational system, along with the social, environmental, health, and informational fabric, which contributes to strengthening the foundations of civil peace. This, in turn, impacts the strength and reputation of the country both externally and internally, and imposes the desired prestigious position among the rest of the countries in the world by establishing systems that achieve sustainable development and enhance social cohesion, protect the information and environmental infrastructure, and secure the necessities of modern technology to confront emergent threats.
This all arises from a educational system that is connected to reality and defines the hopes and aspirations sought: stability, sovereignty, and freedom which together build a lasting and just peace. Without freeing ourselves from oppression, violence, and persecution, and preserving human dignity (as "We have honored the Children of Adam"), we will not approach the aforementioned desired goals.

If we look at emerging countries (at all levels), we find that they have advanced educational systems.

We already realize that the educational system has two interrelated aspects: formal education and non-formal education, in terms of objectives and may differ in method.
For these two aspects to play their interrelated roles, they must commit from the outset to the values and ethics outlined by revealed religious beliefs, without circumvention or distortion, which include plurality and difference, respect, utilizing dialogue to resolve conflicts and differences, and the need to enhance the value of consultation or what has come to be called democracy.

The school, as well as the family, and the educational curriculum, have intertwined roles in developing and enhancing what we aspire to. It is not possible to separate this intertwined relationship. For example, the school has an important role in promoting social solidarity and social responsibility, which may be done by focusing on:-
• Constantly ensuring the dignity of the student, as well as that of teaching and administrative staff, and not using terms that may diminish that dignity to avoid negative results such as lowering self-esteem, or confusion in concepts of culture and national identity.
• Focusing on learning skills in building social relationships based on respect and exchange of opinions, away from exploitation or bullying, while recognizing individual differences, whether emotional, intellectual, or biological, in addition to the necessity to learn skills to build boundaries between personal matters and those that are shared, while maintaining the trait of flexibility in behavior to build positive and supportive social relationships for individuals and the group.
• Working to confront the acute shortage in the culture of social responsibility, the bridge we cross to enhance values of responsibility and mutual respect.

Social responsibility refers to the moral and voluntary commitment that a person embraces toward their community, taking into account their capabilities and the impact of their actions on others' interests and taking responsibility for the outcomes of those practices. To begin with, students should commit to adhering to school rules and laws, completing school assignments, and being ready to engage in voluntary work within the school (as done by Freire students in Beit Hanina, as my grandson told me, represented in caring for younger students while waiting for parents to pick them up or as they leave the school gate), the student's need to maintain the school's environment - preserving it and keeping it clean, avoiding wasting water or electricity...- all of this contributes to enhancing belonging to the small community (the school), which surely will transfer to the larger community that the student is part of.
Moreover, the process of instilling social responsibility contributes to enhancing the value of mutual respect, which is the fuel and foundation for living in peace and safety, and enhancing the value of respect in all its forms: behavioral respect and cognitive respect.
• Given the growing and multiple sources of psychological pressures that affect all segments of society regardless of gender, age, educational, or economic background, and the behavioral disturbances that may result from them which can extend to the emergence of certain diseases, schools and other higher education institutions must take on the responsibility of raising awareness about the importance of mental health culture and psychological treatment for individuals, in all its forms: cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) that focuses on modifying negative thoughts that may affect emotions and therefore behavior; dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) that focuses on regulating emotions; analytical-dynamic therapy, which focuses on understanding experiences and unconscious states that may affect an individual's behavior; or humanistic therapy that focuses on developing individuals' potentials and capabilities, relying on enhancing understanding, empathy, and respect toward building self-esteem, or family therapy that focuses on improving familial relationships or between spouses, and there is group therapy.
• Perhaps the teacher, given what we have mentioned above, in addition to the deplorable economic conditions, and the beginning of the decline of their social status, has become one of the fastest categories to show the results of these conditions, where the following features begin to appear on them:-
- Stress and fatigue: one of the most prominent issues facing those working in the educational field at various levels, as this affects performance quality and the mental and physical health of teachers, given that education is a message that requires emotional and mental presence to be able to focus, open up, and be flexible without diminishing in giving. It becomes impossible to achieve this under fatigue and occupational burnout.
- As Dr. Ala Hussein, head of the psychology department at Al-Quds University, indicated, the multiplicity of forms of educational systems in place and the increasing demands of the message and the doubling of administrative tasks lead to a growing sense of pressure, fatigue, and loss of motivation. A teacher who works in a pressure-filled environment, without psychological or organizational support, becomes susceptible to tension, exhaustion, and loss of professional satisfaction, which negatively reflects on the educational process as a whole. Addressing this phenomenon cannot be isolated from the broader framework of educational policies and working conditions within institutions; it requires a holistic vision that combines psychological rehabilitation, organizational management, and institutional support. Studying the mechanisms to confront this pressure and exhaustion among those working in the educational field aims to uncover the underlying causes of this phenomenon, analyze its reflections on the practice of fulfilling their responsibility, and propose practical means to mitigate its severity. This topic gains particular importance as it touches on the essence of educational action based on human interaction and the value dimension in education, as an exhausted educator cannot innovate or communicate effectively with learners.
One of the most prominent and important forms of pressure that teachers display is fatigue or what is known as professional burnout, which appears as either physical or mental and emotional exhaustion due to continuous exposure to professional pressures without receiving sufficient opportunities for rest, reward, or change, where the teacher begins to lose enthusiasm and motivation towards their mission, or to feel indifferent towards colleagues and colleagues as well as educational activities, which can develop into feelings of helplessness.
These stress sources are numerous, but the subjective condition represented in the presence of occupation, the deteriorating economic situation and scarcity of income has a special significance, followed by the multiplicity of authorities with factional identities that may collide with the teacher's intellectual identity, then a lack of opportunities for healthy social interaction that could elevate morale and determination.
Among the mechanisms that we would like to propose to face such cases are: transparency and objectivity in dealing away from favoritism and narrow partisanship, and improving the living conditions for teachers, so that they do not have to continually resort to strikes and interruptions to fulfill their mission, which results in many negative repercussions: declining academic achievement due to lowered motivation, lack of social interaction that the school used to provide during school hours, diminishing the standing of the educational system locally and globally, in addition to involving the teacher in unwholesome situations from parents, which requires educational leaders to exert their utmost efforts to avoid such repercussions, even if it requires prioritizing the teachers in improving living opportunities!!
Additionally, it is worth noting that the beginning of confronting this pressure and exhaustion begins from within the individual themselves through their self-awareness of the objective and personal conditions, in our case, self-awareness of the objective conditions (occupation and the resulting many disruptions) becomes the starting point, then comes the importance of being concerned with physical health and finding opportunities for social interaction, employing creative thinking, collaborative positive thinking, and avoiding rumors and exaggeration, to avoid reaching a state of despair and hopelessness that may increase the feeling of exhaustion and burnout.
Before delving into the role of those responsible for the educational system in fulfilling its important mission in ensuring national security for the country, I would like to present three global experiences that fall within the classification of our political reality: education in the context of crises and post-crises (In & post Political Conflict).
The first of these countries
- Pretoria: In 1997, I received an invitation from the South African representation to visit the country as part of a selected global delegation, our destinations were four provinces: Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town, and the hardest was Pretoria.
In Johannesburg, we were welcomed by the international fighter Nelson Mandela, after a special reception ceremony, we began the next day visiting the mentioned provinces, we learned and listened a lot, and among the gifts of God was that I met a former classmate in a postgraduate program at the University of London (1991-1993) who held the position of Minister of Social Affairs at the time of this visit, he always recommended guides to take care of me, to the extent that when we visited as a delegation of the late President Mandela at his home for lunch, he elaborated on introducing me to the president.
After spending three days in each province, came the opportunity to visit Pretoria, after a brief explanation from the guides about the province and their insistence on the need to take malaria vaccination (which we had not done in previous visits), I felt great fear and anxiety. We arrived in Pretoria and saw the wretched conditions, the huge number of mosquitoes, all of this was due to the apartheid regime's policy, to the extent that we wished the days would pass quickly.
Circumstances led me to visit it again in 2018 to participate in an international educational conference, and I found myself in another place, to the extent that I imagined I was in Switzerland, not Pretoria: clean streets, well-organized sidewalks, trees and flowers everywhere, and strangely no sanitation workers, my curiosity led me to ask about the reasons for this radical change, and the answer was: it is a culture of shared responsibility, as each family cleans and adorns the area in front of their house.
- The second country is Rwanda, which experienced a civil war between the two largest tribes in the country, which lasted about 12 years, draining the economy and resulting in thousands of victims of all ages, to the extent that campaigns began globally to collect supplies and assistance for families through specialized international institutions. Today, Rwanda ranks highly in terms of civil peace, economic prosperity, and natural beauty.
- The third country is Somalia, which reached a state of famine due to internal fighting among the warring political factions, drowning it in heavy international debt, but at the end of 2024, the Somali consensus government celebrated not only surpassing its significant trade deficit but also managing to generate 30 million US dollars that year!!!
After this brief overview of what those countries were like and what they have become today, we find that, based on reliable sources (studies from the World Bank and others), the main reason for the advancement of the educational system in those countries. The question remains: what is needed for us to overcome various deficiencies as those countries did?
Simply put, we need to recognize and frankly acknowledge: the educational system bears the greatest responsibility through :-
- The absence of a clear vision not only to preserve the values, ethics, and national identity of the student at different ages and educational levels, (Jerusalem is an example of what the Palestinian society is witnessing from internal conflicts which extend to transforming cases of violence in schools into a nearly daily phenomenon accompanied by behaviors that have become attached to the student's personality such as bullying, and this extending to invade the atmosphere of Palestinian families raising the level of domestic violence.
- We are in urgent need of reconsidering and examining the recruitment approach used, placing the right person in the right place, and transcending the criteria of partisanship, while working to erase the belief that "whoever enters the house of Abu Sufyan is safe" due to the absence of transparent accountability systems, or relying on "the organization and political affiliation should ensure the job security of the person, to support this claim, let us look at the approach of extending years of service for some with 'neck bones', and not securing enough opportunities to guarantee the infusion of new blood into the system, thereby contributing to increasing unemployment among graduates (for more on this topic, please refer to the proceedings of the educational conference we held in 2022 "Outputs of university education between available job opportunities and ongoing waves of unemployment), what is required is to carry out both evaluation processes that are characterized by transparency and based on developed civilized systems and laws that guarantee the dignity of teachers and all employees working under the educational system, while ensuring popular participation through expanding opportunities for responsible partnership, and let this be through forming local community councils or a supreme council for education in areas where official sovereignty is absent (Jerusalem is an example).

- Guaranteeing the development of educational programs according to what the national revival process requires to achieve sustainable comprehensive development and not based on the conditions of some donor entities, as is the case in the old and new demands to change Palestinian school curricula, while always overlooking and turning a blind eye to the inciting curricula of the other side, under the pretext of enhancing opportunities for peace, as if the Palestinian student and teacher live on Mars far from their painful daily reality that lacks the simplest daily living requirements: psychological stability and freedom of movement and daily mobility.
- The dire need to enhance the understanding and importance of mental health culture among members of the school community, which will transfer to the larger community, as without strengthening psychological immunity, it is difficult to make even an inch of progress towards the necessary sustainable development to achieve actual liberation and exercise complete sovereignty.