Baghdad teachers open new chapter.

Byline: Bill Glauber

BAGHDAD, Iraq _ At the Socialist School, a secondary school for girls, teachers have swept classrooms, lined up broken desks, yanked down portraits of Saddam Hussein and whitewashed away his slogans, which once covered playground walls.

Now, the teachers wait.

They don't know when classes will begin again. They don't know whether students will brave the sporadic gunfire that echoes in the streets.

They don't know what books to use, what courses to teach, what the future will bring to a frayed education system in a country awaiting direction from U.S. troops and bureaucrats. They don't know whether another generation of students will be lost, not because they cannot learn but because nobody seems to know what to teach.

"Everything is vague to us," said Janeen Salilt, the principal. "We are walking in a dark tunnel."

Stuck in a faded middle-class neighborhood near an expressway, the school is a symbol of the old ways of the Iraqi system and the fresh dreams of a still-stunned country trying to adjust to the post-Saddam era.