It is clear that as 2015 approaches the Saudi education system remains ill-equipped to respond to the needs of a modern Saudi family. What worked a generation ago does not work now. The public policy of leaving education and emotional and physical health of a child to the family in the interest of privacy must be re-examined.
Globally, Saudi Arabia has a reputation as a closed society. But that’s not entirely true anymore. Thousands of scholarships to young men and women to study abroad have changed youths’ perception of the world, not to mention social media and access to western culture with all the negatives and positives that come with it.
As the Saudi society is much more complex than the previous generation, we are more often than not failing our children in school. I know a 6-year-old girl who can serve as a poster girl for what ails our current education system, a system that is mired in the 1970s; that offers few resources to Saudi families that deal with psychological and emotional issues their children face. These issues were not apparent 40 years ago.
This young girl is extremely bright, independent and social, She has an imagination that astounds her family and strangers alike. But she struggles in school for no obvious reason. She is Saudi, speaks Arabic, but can’t master the Arabic alphabet. She can count, but can’t make the distinction between the Arabic numbers seven and eight. She will play with an iPad all day, but won’t read a book. She had enjoyed extended stays in the United States, and often prefers to speak English at home but she uses isolated English words rather than speak full sentences. She has no interest in the curriculum and is completely indifferent to school in general.
Her problem could be her vision. It could be dyslexia. It could be anything, but so far there is nothing apparent to explain her lack of enthusiasm for school or the simple joy of reading or writing. Her parents are at a complete loss to deal with the problem.
But the tragedy here is not the parents’ inability to cope with their child’s failings at school, but that school administrators appear to have no interest in finding the cause of their first-grader’s poor academic performance. Perhaps the lack of interest is unfair. Better put, school personnel are ill-trained to deal with the problem. The attitude is generally to send them home and let the parents sort it out.
Most Saudi schools these days have a sociologist on staff to deal with minor emotional issues or spot potential abuse. There are no psychologists on staff or testing mechanisms in place to determine why a child is underperforming or not performing at all in the classroom.
Rather than ignore the child, as often is the case, teachers should be required to identify children with academic problems and then refer those children for evaluation to an expert who can identify the root cause of an underachieving student. The expert should then schedule a parent-teacher conference to determine why the child is having difficulty in the first place.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of children, such as the 6-year-old girl I know, who fall through the cracks of our education system. The responsibility is left to the parents to solve the problem, although parents rarely have the expertise or training to deal with such a daunting task.
While Saudi society has done well in the past decade to accept the practice of psychology and psychiatry as a means to help adults with emotional or mental problems, that acceptance has yet to filter down into the primary and secondary education system where children are most vulnerable. If underachieving children are not intercepted today and given our attention to improve, then they inevitably could end up as marginal citizens in the future.
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