It gives me great happiness to express my deep thanks and appreciation to His Royal Highness Prince Muhammad bin Fahd for his kind invitation to me to attend this year's ceremony of giving out his Award for Excellence in Education. I assure him and you that nothing is dearer to my heart than being at an event related to education. I consider education as the knob of the balance or the fulcrum in the lives of nations. Nations will achieve progress whenever they use education properly in the building of their future. These same nations will regress if they make education just decor classrooms for erasing illiteracy and producing semi-educated people.
I would like to avail of this opportunity to speak about my personal concerns as a citizen about the sector of education. Like many others, I believe that the material and logistical input in this particular sector is not commensurate with the size of its output. Despite the lavish spending of the government on education and the strong will to rectify its paths, our education is still mortgaging itself to the traditional performance. Subsequently, our schools have become halls replete with boredom, lassitude and tediousness. Our children drag their legs heavily every morning to go to their schools. They hardly wait for the bell to ring announcing the end of the school day. They are just like prisoners waiting to escape from captivity.
The national honesty necessitates, first and foremost, to forgo our negative attitude and unjustified apprehensions. We should extend our hands to those in charge to provide our sons and daughters with a quality education. We should be true to ourselves and to our nation on matters concerning education, which is the pillar for the development and progress of any nation and the key to the doors of the future. We have basic concepts in this country that we are not willing to sacrifice, which are the total rejection of anything that contradicts our religion and creed. This leaves us with room for free movement. We can, therefore, build an education that will produce highly educated people, scientists and specialists. We should seek an education that will not just stop at teaching our youngsters how to read and write. We need an education that would reflect our true Arab and Islamic character and place our country in its appropriate place among nations. We need education that will contribute to innovations and inventions. We need education that will teach us more than just being able to read the catalogs of imported commodities.
Undoubtedly you all know the human resources represent the real wealth of all nations. It is a wealth that is renewable and cannot be depleted. The contemporary studies have focused on the importance of human capital. If we do not use our immense financial and demographic wealth in building an advanced educational system, that will build, produce and deliver and if we fail to invest our huge richness in building quality education, we will find ourselves at the very bottom of the list of advanced countries.
Once former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad visited us. He was the man who, in 20 years, led his country from living on the products of rubber and cocoa to one of the important Asian tigers that are now producing electronics and attracting industrial investments from all over the world. His first and last advice to us was to give more attention to mathematics and science. I was pained to read in the biography of former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Perez that his country was investing in the minds of its youth much more than the entire GCC countries were together investing on their oil. I want to ask a simple question. What prevents us from investing in the minds of our sons and daughters through education? What is stopping us from competing in our educational input with the other countries of the world as long as we have the will and the potential? Are we going to be captives of the hegemony of others? Why do we fear change and for how long?
We want to extricate ourselves from the sensitivities of hegemony of education. Religion is our constitution and the ceiling of freedom in education and all other fields. It was the first Muslim scholars who established the modern sciences, arithmetic, algebra, medicine, engineering, astronomy and ophthalmology. Our ancestors will definitely be happier about our own achievements than recounting their accomplishments.
The evaluation of any educational system should be based, first and foremost, on the qualitative performance. However, the parameters of evaluation in our country is still based on the quantitative concept such as the rising number of schools, and students and increasing fund allocations. This is done on account of the quantitative development. The syllabuses, the methods of instruction and the evaluation systems have remained static. Our education is based on just filling the minds of the students with the syllabuses instead of really cultivating them, inculcating knowledge among them, develop their skills and teach them how to think and reach conclusions. The huge amount of theoretical information was eating much of the time in classrooms. The students are not taught how to express their opinions. It is freethinking that builds independent and confident personalities.
It is really regrettable that the development of the syllabuses has stopped at a certain point beyond which it did not move. The syllabuses were made into a combat zone between various schools of thought, some of which had no relation whatsoever to education. The duel and the flagrant interventions in educational matters distracted the teachers from their duties and stopped their training programs. These conflicts became the most prominent detrimental factor impeding the development of education in our country.
The loss of balance in the syllabuses' map led to a big crack in our educational system. A recent report by the National Center for Assessment said students who obtained 90 in the assessment tests were less than two percent of whom 80 percent were non-Saudis. The report said the TIMSS tests in the subjects of science and mathematics for the second year intermediate students were in a margin that was less than 10 percent. International assessments showed that the performance of only 3 percent of students in Saudi Arabia was up to global standard. According to Aramco employment tests, the standard of 84 percent of the secondary school graduates who applied for jobs in the company was equivalent or less than the level of second year intermediate school students.
A World Bank report on education placed us at a very low position. The Kingdom was ranked 17 within the Arab world. This place does not suit the Kingdom or the level of its spending on education. These are disappointing results especially when we come to know that about 25 percent of the allocations of the general budget go for education. According to a statistical report, the government spends an average of SR19,600 on each Saudi student. This is much more than the per capita spending on students in other countries.
Figures do not lie. For instance, the allocation for education during this year's budget of SR168 billion was more than the entire government budget of 1994. It is equivalent to the budgets of six Arab countries put together. So as long as the government gives education a priority in its spending and provides it with lavish support, so the question which arises is: Where does the missing ring lie? Our responsibility as citizens makes it imperative on us to specify the wound in order to heal. For fairness and justice, I am sure that Minister of Education Prince Faisal bin Abdullah and officials of his ministry are fully aware of the situation. They are doing their best to come up with unprecedented strategies to improve the quality of education. I am aware that the program of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah for the development of education, which started in 2005, was built on important bases including the development of syllabuses, the rehabilitation of teachers and the improvement of the educational environment. Officials in charge of education could not meet these challenges alone. We have to join hands to implement these strategies together. We should consider the development of education our future option and the most important national challenge. We should not keep education imprisoned in its old mold.
You all know about the low standards of our university graduates, which were uncovered by the National Center for Assessment. Some of these graduates have actually joined the field of education. I will not mention the ratios or the inseparable relation between the standard of the teacher and the quality of education. I will just suffice by mentioning that while 49 percent of the teachers in our general education were rated excellent, this ratio was only 5 percent in Singapore.
The inability of the educational input to cope with the needs and requirements of the sustainable development was an obvious problem. This inability has become the center of our discussions. It represents one of the shortcomings of our education. The negative consequences of this predicament are not limited to the financial waste and unemployment but extend to reach the very essence of our daily life.
Neither the generous spending nor the good intentions will ensure us with a quality education every citizen was aspiring for. The silent majority, who knows very well that the future of the country and its population depends largely on education, must have a say in this. Education should not be considered as just a textbook and blackboard affair. It should not also be a guarantee for jobs to the graduates. It should rather be an arm for the future. It is the key to the development of human resources, which largely depends on the quality of the human element and the absorption of knowledge.
I have great hopes that the National Authority for Accreditation and Quality Control which the king had ordered would soon be established to assess our education so as to attain the future we are all aspiring to.
