We live in a smaller and more competitive world today, and people want to be influential and benefit from conventions. Competition is not just among individuals but also between countries. Knowledge, learning, information and cognitive skills are as important today as industrial manufacturing. It’s for this reason that citizens owe to their country their own efforts to reform and fix out public education system. We must all invest in this effort.
Education, not oil, is the key to our future. Education, not oil, is how future Saudi workers will be able to gain financial freedom. Likewise, those without proper education will be (and, in fact, are) a social burden that hinders national progress.
Learning is a comprehensive process. It begins at home, first and foremost. In the public realm, it begins at kindergarten, and runs through primary school, high school and college, each level supporting the next one until the student is in the real world passing on his or her experience to the next generation of educated citizens.
My experience in the educational system has come from 44 years at King Saud University. During this time I have come to conclude that the Saudi educational system (and perhaps society’s overall view of education) is in dire need of reform. This need is greater in the age of information technology and the era of knowledge-based economies.
One of the biggest problems is the lack of adequate communication skills. Never mind a basic understanding of English as a second language, I have observed Saudi university students that are incapable of explaining themselves properly in their mother tongue, Arabic.
What should we do? First we should let go of conventional methods of teaching in Saudi Arabia, not just a heavy dependence on rote learning — where students are dictated concepts and they are graded on how well they repeat these concepts like machines — but also the lack of consideration for teaching English as a second language. Our primary school students should be reading Shakespearean sonnets as well as Al-Akkad’s novels. Some might think I’m asking for too much, but I say: Why not? If English and independent thinking help raise people’s (and countries’) economic status, why not?
Math, chemistry, physics, biology, Arabic, English, extracurricular activities, a wide variety of courses — and did I mention English? — are all areas where the educational system could improve.
Why am I emphasizing the need to teach English? Because the best books in higher education are published in English; because the Internet is primarily an English-language portal; and because English is the default language of many professions, from engineering to piloting.
At the same time, we must encourage critical and analytical thinking at all stages of education. Hence, we need to scale back our dependence on rote memorization and encourage original thoughts — the thinking of inventors, researchers and creative designers.
Teachers aren’t off the hook here. On the contrary, our teachers need to educate themselves, to be trained effectively, and to constantly have their methods refreshed or updated to adapt to the rapid pace of the modern world. I’ve seen teachers that are unable to use their own teaching tools, like overhead projectors. Many times they seem to forget their purpose, too busy watching out for the trees to think about the forest. Teachers must also be mentors.
Does the Ministry of Education have the courage to abandon the obsolete teaching methods and shift to a new learning style that makes the student (and the country) capable of adapting to changes that, for better or for worse, are inevitable?
