“But I don’t want to go to school!” protested my six-year-old upon hearing that we would be leaving London imminently precisely for this reason.
“Well, you have to,” I rebuked sternly. She then launched into quite an opinionated, structured and well-substantiated tirade as to why she didn’t “need” to go to school, how she didn’t really feel that she “learned” that much and how she was much better off staying in London doing the “cool stuff” that her cousins did at the place they attended. Her concluding statement was, “So, why can’t I go to a school like that?”
“Because,” I wanted to tell her, “Where we come from we don’t really have schools like that.”
The worst part of the whole argument was that in spirit I completely agreed with her. It really is dreadfully difficult as a parent to enforce something that you don’t actually believe in yourself.
The scenario was reminiscent of when I had first enrolled my eldest into school and had subsequently struggled terribly with a conscience that could allow my daughter to become part of an establishment where instead of expanding the box to fit the child, as they do so earnestly in the West, they would chop bits off the child in order to fit her into the box.
I was really crushed when she would come home in floods of tears after having been made to sit on a naughty line for speaking out of turn.
I watched in horror as she would assemble her dolls and teddy bears into an imaginary classroom setting and then parade around them hitting her hand menacingly with a ruler and unexpectedly swivelling 180 degrees to pick on a Barbie that had not been paying attention, or thump on a book to the line that a panda was supposed to be reading, or sardonically enunciate a word mispronounced by Garfield.
If ever I tried to help her with homework and teach her a different method to make the concepts appear easier, she would inevitably hold it against me after having been derided by her teacher the following day in front of all her classmates.
At one point, I was so disillusioned by the whole system that I considered innumerable alternatives convincing myself that anything had to be better than this.
One of my friends, a Saudi educationalist, sniggered at my efforts saying, “Lubna. What on earth do you think that you’re doing? Do you really think that you’re going to make things better by moving the poor kid? Let me tell you something. You can move her into a different building, but you can’t move her into a different system of education. Whatever change you make will be purely cosmetic!”
She was absolutely right. The only schools that, in my humble opinion, afford children a decent holistic and fruitful education are international ones.
There are Saudis fortunate enough to attend these, but even if I had the monetary means to shift my girls to one of those, I certainly don’t have the all-pervasive influence, reserved as always for a select few, to wangle the bureaucracy for securing permission.
Besides, why should I have to resort to this drastic measure when the very least I can expect is to send my children to a public school that caters for their diverse needs? As a citizen of this country I don’t think that this is too much to ask.
This is where the real problem lies. We are too used to dealing with all the symptomatic manifestations of the deficiency of our basic education system in the laziness, inefficiency and blinkered approach of some of our compatriots.
I have called for it before and I will call for it again. What we need is a total revamping of the entire teaching and learning structure. We must begin with a carte blanche and be allowed to compile upon it our wish list as parents and educators as to what qualities we would like to witness in our youth.
If we want them to be hard-working, motivated and creative, then it is hardly appropriate to support a system that relies on rote learning, bores them to tears and stamps out their innovativeness.
Learning in Saudi Arabia is not fun. It’s not fun for the teachers and it definitely isn’t fun for the children.
That’s a rather sad reflection of the state of affairs within our classrooms considering that all schools of thought pertaining to education in the early years focus on the importance of making lessons exciting and different.
If Charles Dickens were to pay a visit to a classroom from a government school here, I am sure that he would find the environment comfortingly familiar and might even draw from it the inspiration to craft some of his fictional characters.
So how and what do our children learn here?
Through techniques of repetition, humiliation and coercion they master the art of being like everyone else. This is a very fundamental principle of survival within the current framework.
If a child is different then that child is forced to abandon their uniqueness in order to be accepted by their teachers. If a child asks too many questions this is perceived as being impertinent as opposed to intelligent.
I personally have struggled with this for years.
Both my children started off full of spirit and that unmistakable joie de vivre so characteristic of the young, but over the years adapted to a suppressive and rigid environment not geared toward entertaining differences by slowly and studiedly becoming invisible.
Is there anything that can be done? In my estimation we have the capacity, intelligence and resources to really make the necessary difference.
Most importantly the whole syllabus needs to be redressed focusing on how best to incorporate teaching youngsters not only what’s in the textbooks, but how to apply what they know to everyday tasks and situations.
It is this application of knowledge that is desperately lacking. In order to achieve this however, we need to better train teachers and somehow break the age old cycle of teaching how one was taught.
During my own schooldays it was rarely the subject that in itself was a cause of fascination, but rather how it was communicated to us through a teacher.
I know through my own experience teaching in a Saudi school that one has to plan every step of one’s lessons in minute detail, submit these plans to a “supervisor” who by merit of her age and position in the hierarchy has the ability to judge one’s teaching success by what is recorded on that bit of paper, and is then subject to the severest of scrutiny to ensure that these blueprints are adhered to.
What struck me is the wasteful bureaucracy that stifles the individual creativity of the professional in question, in addition to the fact that some people may look wonderful on paper but are totally ineffectual when it comes to imparting their knowledge.
Bringing concepts to life and allowing a child to think are vital to the learning process.
My children were mesmerized by a workshop at the Science Museum in London about bridge building, a subject that certainly is not ordinarily stimulating.
They learned through interacting with the demonstrator and hands-on experiments about really quite complicated engineering principles.
They were taught the concept of stress and forces by constructing a bridge supported by eggs.
They effortlessly estimated how many sandbags their creation would support and were in peals of hysterics when the eggs smashed under the load!
I am certain that these memories will stay with them in a more pronounced fashion than anything they will read about in a physics textbook.
As the summer draws to a close and children all over the country anxiously anticipate their return to school, there are several ways in which educational establishments Kingdomwide can encourage their students to do better.
As I have said before, in order to better serve our youth and give them a head start in life it is vitally important that we inculcate within them some very basic principles at a very early age, the love of learning being foremost amongst these.
What they assimilate when they are young, cannot be taught at a later stage.
In an age where standing apart is more important than being one of the crowd and ingenuity is more in demand than ever, it is crucial to get the balance right in the first place.
Our current system is reflective of the Japanese proverb that states, “The nail that stands out is the one that is hammered down.”
(Lubna Hussain is a Saudi writer. She is based in Riyadh.)
