the camps said it was “serious,” while the “learning centers are for playing, not for education.” Humanitarian education providers, coordinated by UNICEF, are creating an informal curriculum from scratch, but it is a slow process. These non-governmental humanitarian groups began to roll out the first “level” of the new curriculum, equivalent to a year of preprimary education, in January 2019. As of August 2019, the government had only approved the first two “levels,” which are intended to take a student from kindergarten up to the equivalent of the second year of primary school. Previously, the only education available to Rohingya refugees consisted of basic instruction — without lesson plans to guide inexperienced teachers — in English, Burmese, math, and “life skills” that one teacher said involved “mak[ing] students aware of different types of diseases, or letting the kids play with some toys.” The quality of education was poor. “It’s playtime for little kids,” an 11-year-old boy said. The informal curriculum marks an improvement over the status quo ante. But in addition to the prolonged delay in approving it, Bangladesh has not accredited the informal curriculum, and there is still no pathway for Rohingya children to a certified education. The education crisis faced by Rohingya refugee children is especially acute because Myanmar had already deprived many of them of access to school. Children dropped out of schools in Rakhine state due to discrimination, harassment, or fear of abuse by security forces, or because the government barred Rohingya from teaching while non-Rohingya teachers refused to teach in their communities. Movement restrictions imposed on Rohingya by the Myanmar authorities were particularly harmful to secondary-school-age children, unless there was a secondary school in their own town or village. The only university that had accepted Rohingya students in Rakhine state stopped doing so in 2012. Only a handful of Rohingya refugees in the camps have university degrees. As an indication of how damaging this was to the Rohingya community, humanitarian groups that operate learning centers report difficulty hiring Rohingya who had completed their secondary education. A positive aspect of the learning centers is that each employs one Rohingya refugee and one Bangladeshi national as instructors. For Rohingya, the learning centers offer one of the few paid jobs available in the camps. “ARE WE HUMAN?” 4