BAGHDAD, Iraq - Martabha Saleem earns $4 to $5 a week selling cigarettes, more than a teacher, doctor or engineer makes in a month. The 14-year-old attends school, but the most important lesson he says he has learned on the streets of central Baghdad is that no amount of studying will help him, or his family, survive.

Survival is a lesson that Sheda Ibrahim, 15, is learning. Having been unable to attend classes for two years, she spends her time watching television or helping her aunt in the kitchen. She says she can read, but she blushes and slams a book shut when asked to try.

She would like to go to class, but her widowed mother insists that schooling is impossible.

"I forced my daughter to leave school because of a shortage of money," says Iftekhar Ibrahim, 42. Classes are free, but the family cannot afford the school supplies. "I don't have enough money to spend," she says.

The outlook for Iraq - no matter whether the United States makes good on its announced policy of getting rid of President Saddam Hussein - is grim. Much of the reason is the collapse of the educational system. Many Iraqis, especially youngsters such as Martabha and Sheda, have given up hope for a decent life.

"There is the full possibility that Iraq could break down as a state," says Wamidh Nadhmi, a political science professor at Baghdad University. "The regime may stay on, but there will be no longer such a thing as Iraq."

Iraq was once a nation that prided itself on its schools. Parents from around the Arab world and beyond used to send their children here to study in the universities. But those days are well in the past.

Twenty-two years of war and international sanctions have turned Iraq into a nation of have-nots led by an entrenched regime that stands above the day-to-day reality of how its citizens are forced to live. The government can no longer guarantee electricity, running water, sewage disposal or health care, and so its citizens look to family, faith and their tribes for solace and security.

Individually, each shortfall hurts. But collectively they have doomed the education system, widely viewed as the foundation of any society. One in four children do not go to school, and those who do receive less than four hours of instruction a day.

The nation's run-down infrastructure and a lack of money to repair it have made it nearly impossible for the school system to function. Impoverished families rely on their children to beg and peddle so they can eat.

Malfunctioning sewers leave many schools without functioning toilets, so children must run home in the middle of class to use the bathroom. Intermittent electricity means studying in the dark. No heat means cold classrooms in winter. Limited cash means too few school buildings, too few teachers, too few textbooks, too few pencils.

The result has been generations of uneducated or undereducated children. Less than 10 percent of eligible children are enrolled in kindergarten. More than 31 percent of girls are not attending primary school, and dropout rates for intermediate and preparatory levels have increased to 38 percent in some grades. Literacy has plummeted, especially among women, from 87 percent in 1985 to 45 percent in 1995, the most recent year for which statistics have been kept.

"The education is so poor here, parents feel 'what is the point?'" says Carel de Rooy, regional representative of UNICEF, which is renovating schools and supplying chairs and desks to others. "A taxi driver can make more than an engineer."

The sanctions, which deny Iraq access to cash and limit its ability to import supplies, have played a large role in the deterioration of education, but they are not the only culprit. The besieged regime has not made education a priority, so it is not building schools.

Experts say the nation needs 5,000 new schools just to meet demand. Because of the shortfall of educated professionals, the future is also uncertain. Gone are the specialists who might someday be able to rebuild the nation - not only the infrastructure, but also civil society.

"It will take over two generations just to get the country back to where it was in the '80s," says de Rooy. "It can take two, three, four years just to sort it out if we really focus on it. By the time you graduate the first professional, it will be 15 years."

There are fancy cars and wealthy neighborhoods in Baghdad, but the vast majority of the people, even those with decent jobs, are in debt and scraping to get by. Many streets are filled with men, women and children with filthy clothing, tired expressions and stooped shoulders. They survive on government handouts of food but must scrounge additional money to buy meat and vegetables, which are not supplied.

Reports by UNICEF speak of physical and psychological suffering among children, who are usually undernourished and often depressed.

The effects of that deprivation is on display at the used-book market on Al Mutanabi Street. The shop is in one of the oldest parts of the city on a short, narrow street bordered by once-elegant buildings now turned to squalor. Peddlers line the pavement with books that families have sold to help pay for rent and food.

Abdul Rahman Ziad, 12, is a fourth-grader. He has been for three years because of poor grades.

The boy's clothing is tattered, and he spends his one day off a week trying to sell sodas, pushing a battered wooden cart through a downtown market crowded with people. He has to do it, he says, because his father is unemployed and spends his days sitting idly at home.

"I want to be an engineer someday," the boy says as he pushes his cart off into the crowd.

The hopelessness starts with the children and gets worse by the time they are teen-agers and in the job market.

Adel Khudair, 19, never had time to learn. He is busy loading sacks of flour into people's carts at a food distribution center in a run-down neighborhood. He dropped out of school in second grade to help support his nine brothers and sisters. His mother doesn't work, and he says his father earns $45 a month picking dates.

"Life is difficult," he says. "It's better to work."

Not far away, in a more middle-class neighborhood, Ahmed Abdu Sattar, 14, is sitting alone in a one-room shop at the end of a small alley. He is busy stitching pillows, and his fingers work the needle with speed and precision. He has been doing this for two years - since he dropped out of school to help his family survive. He makes 50 cents a day and says proudly that he has ambitions.

"I don't like to do just pillows," he says. "I want to make carpets and shades someday, too."

Michael Slackman is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing Co. newspaper.