Education Thrives on Consistency, and Lebanon Still Lacks It
When I think back to my early years in school, the lessons were simple. A chalkboard, a few markers, and a teacher doing their best while the electricity flickered in the background. A class would finally settle, a discussion would gain momentum, and the lights would cut without warning. We’d sit in the dim room, the fans would suddenly stop, and we were left waiting for the power to return, trying to remember where the lesson left off. Those interruptions were part of the experience, so common that no one questioned them.
As the years passed, classrooms began to modernize. Projectors arrived. Computer labs appeared. And eventually, interactive dashboards took their place at the front of the room. These dashboards became a source of excitement; they felt like a step into the future. Teachers redesigned lessons around them, students leaned closer to the glowing screens, and the whole school seemed to believe that this was the solution we had been waiting for. Finally, technology was here to fix what had long been broken.
But the interruptions stayed. The dashboards froze mid lesson, the Wi-Fi collapsed at the wrong moment, the electricity cut just as the new tools were beginning to make a difference.
The technology advanced, yet the experience stayed strangely familiar. The same pause, the same silence, the same loss of rhythm. It became clear that the issue had never truly been the tools themselves, it was whether they could stay on long enough to be useful.
That memory followed me when analyzing towns across Lebanon, I saw the same pattern we lived in classrooms: places that seemed equipped still struggled, while others managed with far less. At first glance, the landscape looked scattered and contradictory.
But something shifted when the focus switched from the presence of infrastructure to its stability. Suddenly, the picture made sense. Towns where electricity stayed on, even modestly longer, began to show noticeably stronger educational outcomes. Where the internet didn’t collapse, lessons actually reached their end. Where systems held together, learning had the space to take shape.
We can see how dramatically education improves the moment infrastructure stops stalling. The rise is immediate. The difference is visible. And beyond a certain point, adding more tools doesn’t change much, what matters is that the existing ones work reliably.
It reminded me of all the classrooms I’d sat in. From chalkboards to dashboards to online lessons, the tools changed, yet the experiences rose and fell with the stability behind them. Two schools could have the same equipment and the same ambitions, but if one lost power twice a day, the outcomes were never going to match.
That is why the solution is not about installing more dashboards or building more facilities. It’s about making sure the systems already in place function consistently. When electricity stays on and connections hold, students engage differently, teachers teach differently, and the promise of modern tools finally becomes real.
Education doesn’t move forward just because technology arrives. It moves forward when technology stays alive long enough to matter.
And when I look back at the classrooms I grew up in, and the classrooms students sit in today, the story feels unchanged in one important way: progress has never been limited by how much we have, it has been limited by how reliably it works.