For Most Young Refugees From Syria, School Is as Distant as Home BAALBEK, Lebanon - Standing in the front of a classroom, Khalid Naji, a 13-year-old Syrian refugee, clutched a red felt pen and began copying the English sentence he had composed in his notebook. "Rana doesnt blay football," he wrote on a whiteboard, looking down at his notebook before slowly composing each letter, "but he riding story." At an after-school program here in rural central Lebanon, the goal was to prepare young Syrian refugees for Lebanon's public schools. Depending on the school, the instruction could be in English or French, a daunting challenge either way for Syrians educated in Arabic. Khalid sat down and said with teenage bravado that English was easy. But his mother, Manal Naji, said later that her son had been held back a grade last year at the Lebanese public school he was attending. "He didn't understand what his teacher was saying," she said. He still doesn't. I'm worried. He used to be at the top of his class in Damascus. At least, though, her son was enrolled in school. Of the 2.3 million registered Syrian refugees in the region, an estimated 865,000 are children, and about 70 percent of them are not enrolled in school, Unicef says. But the real figure is almost certainly higher. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have yet to be registered by the United Nations, especially in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. The children among them, probably accounting for one-third, are unlikely to be attending school. Many are simply unable to register in school systems that are struggling to deal with the inundation of Syrians. Among those who do enroll, many attend irregularly because of cost or safety concerns. Others, especially those who have already missed a year or two of school because of the conflict in Syria, are unable to cope with a new environment, a new curriculum and, in the case of Lebanon, a new language. Still others work to help parents whose savings are being depleted. Some of the children receive lessons outside school. But many just spend their days doing little in camps or in the communities that host Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt. As Syria's civil war nears the end of its third year, experts warn of a lost generation of Syrian children that could prove one of the most damaging consequences of the war. "If this problem is left unaddressed, the children will lose hope, especially adolescents," said Maria Calivis, the regional director of Unicef who oversees its response to the crisis. They will replicate and perpetuate the violence that they have seen. And they will lack the skills and knowledge that one day will be needed to rebuild Syria. Before the war, enrollment of school-age children in Syria had reached 80 percent, a "relatively high" figure for the Middle East, Ms. Calivis said. In the previous decade, the Syrian government had made it a priority to increase enrollment nationwide, of girls especially, and to build new schools in poor areas. In Syria, the fighting is keeping 1.9 million children out of school, or about 40 percent of the country's current population of school-age children, according to Unicef. Across this region, schools that were already overcrowded are groaning under the weight of Syrian children who have sometimes doubled the schools" student bodies. They are scrambling to start afternoon shifts, find extra classrooms and hire new teachers among locals or Syrian refugees. By early next year, United Nations officials hope to reach an agreement among the region's governments to certify the schooling of the Syrian children. In Lebanon - overwhelmed by the influx of a million Syrians, the equivalent of one-quarter of its population - only 13 percent of the Syrian children, or about 53,000, are enrolled in public schools, the lowest percentage among the host countries, according to Unicef. About 70 percent of Lebanese children attend private schools in Lebanon, a legacy of its 15-year civil war, leaving its public school system severely underfinanced. The estimated 400,000 Syrian children who are school-age in Lebanon already outnumber the 300,000 Lebanese in the nation's public schools. Ill-equipped to handle the Syrian children and their particular needs, Lebanon's public schools have yet to start the afternoon shifts for Syrians that are now common in Jordan and Turkey. At an elementary school in Deddeh, a village in northern Lebanon, 59 of the 546 students are Syrian. History and geography are taught in Arabic, and French is used for other subjects.