RIYADH, 7 January 2003 — Education Minister Dr. Muhammad Al-Rasheed has said that the Saudi school syllabus has “several defects” and his ministry is making every effort to address and eliminate them.

Al-Rasheed made the remarks on Sunday at a meeting of the Shoura Council, which discussed the need for a total reevaluation of the education system.

He emphasized the significance of reviewing and evaluating the general education system with the objective of highlighting the positive features and eliminating its weak points.

The minister expressed the hope that the council’s discussion would help find solutions to the problems that stand in the way of rapid progress in the field of education.

The minister also highlighted the importance of teachers being properly qualified to perform their tasks successfully.

Answering questions put forward by council members, the minister acknowledged that a huge amount of money is being wasted in schools.

As few as 10 students, he said, are studying in many of the 129,000 schools in the Kingdom.

In such economically unfeasible schools, the government spends SR120,000 per student each year, in contrast to cities like Riyadh where the cost of educating a student is only SR8,000 per year.

The minister appealed to the council members to enact new laws which would stipulate that schools should not be opened if there are not sufficient students to attend them.

Replying to criticism from council members that the ministry does not follow up on its promises to launch new projects such as the national computer project, the teaching of English in primary schools, and the issuing of licenses for more private schools, the minister said such projects cannot be implemented without thorough studies and consultations with experts in the field.

He added that although teaching English at the primary levels has been found successful in several other countries, his ministry would not hesitate to abandon it if it was discovered that English is an obstacle to the proper learning of formal Arabic.

In a related development, a high-ranking ministry official has announced that the ministry has finally come up with a way of attracting private investors to build new girls’ schools.

The government will guarantee the investors that they will get their investments back with some profit either in the form of bonds or cash, Abdul Rahman Al-Ahmad, undersecretary for girls education at the Education Ministry, told Al-Eqtisadiah newspaper. The cash will be paid to them in installments over a period of 10 years.

Al-Ahmad added that his department is planning to construct 200 school buildings for girls at a cost of SR1 billion in various parts of the Kingdom under the new scheme. The new system has been adopted since private investors were skeptical that the existing system could not guarantee a return for their initial cash injection.

Most investors were against the previous system that stipulated investors should construct buildings and then rely on rents to make money over the long term.

A total of SR1.45 billion has been allocated in the new budget for new school buildings and equipment.