AL-JOUF, 1 March 2007 — Princess Sarah bint Abdullah said yesterday during a forum in this northern Saudi city that the focus Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah has put on educational reforms has helped set in motion radical changes to the system, such as a shift from rote memorization to more progressive forms of learning.
“King Abdullah’s education policy has been instrumental in extricating about five million schoolchildren from the traditional system, based mainly on dictation and introducing them to the modern, scientific style of education,” said the princess, who is also the wife of Al-Jouf Governor Prince Fahd ibn Badr, during a seminar on girls’ education hosted by the General Education Administration in Al-Jouf. “More than 400,000 teachers in the Kingdom’s schools have been re-educated in order to achieve a transformation in the educational environment in our schools,” she said.
Muhammad Ghazi Al-Anazi, director of national and foreign education for international schools in the region, discussed the history of the Saudi educational system and Maha Mowaisher, supervisor of English language for the schools in the region, presented two papers on the ways to improve English-language teaching.
Mowaisher said that in the years after girls’ education was introduced by King Faisal in the 1960s the system didn’t encourage teaching second languages to girls.
Jihan Al-Anqari read a paper on the difficulties faced by the foreign schools’ department in the girls’ education administration. She stressed the need for unifying the teaching methods in the boys and girls schools. The schools should also be connected through networking so that they can share their experiences.
