RIYADH, 8 January — A workshop on school education organized by the Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States (ABEGS) was opened here today with an aim to review the whole system of education among the public and private schools of the Gulf states including Saudi Arabia. This three-day event has been organized under the patronage of the Saudi Minister of Education Dr. Muhammad Al-Rasheed.
The objective behind holding this workshop entitled the "Future of the school" is to identify the flaws of the school education system among the member countries of the ABEGS, said Dr. Saeed M. Al-Mullais, ABEGS director general, who was speaking during the inaugural session of the workshop here today. The workshop will try to find ways to cooperate with other institutions of the Gulf states for imparting quality school education.
The workshop called for mapping out comprehensive and unified strategy on school education. "The objectives of the strategy should be to ensure that education becomes more efficient to meet the religious, economic and social needs of the country and to eradicate illiteracy as a whole", said Dr. Al-Mullais.
An ABEGS member, Saudi Arabia, has set up a huge general school education, which consists of kindergarten, six years of primary school and three years each of intermediate and high school. The Saudi ministry of education, which has been working to streamline the operations of the schools, has set up overall standards for the educational system. It also oversees special education for the handicapped.
The dramatic quantitative growth of the educational system since the introduction of the first Five Year Plan in 1970 has been more than matched by an improvement in the quality of education. One measure of this emphasis is that while the number of students in the school education increased eight fold between 1970 to 1999, the number of full-time teachers grew more than 12 times
The Kingdom's ratio of 15.1 students to every teacher is one of the lowest in the world. The Saudi government, however, continues to work to improve educational standards by training teachers, improving standards for evaluation of students and increasing the use of educational technology including computers.
Referring to the efforts of the ABEGS to promote Arabization of education and publication of important works, Dr. Al-Mullais said that this Gulf organization has devoted much attention to the field of Arabization, translation and publication. The ABEGS has published over 300 major titles so far including the translated works of several experts from the Gulf region.
The ABEGS can play a role in the Arabization of education by cooperating with over 200 Arab universities located in different countries of the Arab world. This will be in addition to the efforts of the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO), which has already set up an Arabization Bureau in Rabat and an Arab Institute for Translations and Arabization in Damascus.
The ALECSO has also completed a project for the Arabization of the school curriculum in Arab countries including the Gulf states. The Arabization exercise, however, has not been completed for the higher education level as many Arab countries and their academic institutions rely on foreign books and materials. The ALECSO is also currently working in the area of distance education.
