Poor show: A lesson learned from Olympics

Olympics is the event where a country reaps the harvest of its continuous efforts and investment in human resources. We have invested billions of dollars over the years in human resources and sports facilities but our performance in the Olympics was not commensurate with our investment. We got only one bronze medal in equestrian, team jumping.
By looking at the medal count of London Olympics, we may easily conclude that financial resources allocated for human development and the establishment of advanced sports facilities can be surmounted by the spirit to win. This could be the determinant factor in any winning story and the Olympics medal count has shown that we lack this spirit.
Countries with less vital economy than Saudi Arabia have obtained several medals. For example, Cuba earned 14 medals, Jamaica 12, Kenya 11 and Ethiopia 7. Also, countries with equivalent economy to Saudi Arabia obtained reasonably good number of medals. For instance, Iran and Turkey. They bagged 12 and 5 medals respectively.
So, what went wrong with us. I would say it is the huge wealth that we have accumulated all of a sudden with the boom in oil prices in the 1970s. This wealth has changed the fundamental values that we used to hold dearly, specifically concerning hard work. We have outsourced basic work that every person in the world executes on daily basis, and as a result, we have become markedly lazy people – couch potatoes.
This state of ineptness significantly changed our character we had inherited from our ancestors — being active in our daily lives and in the world. This wealth at our disposal now will diminish or disappear one day and we would have to do our own work. This needs reassessment of our course of action, the way we used to do things and what we need to do and adjust accordingly. This is necessary to achieve any meaningful task.
This process will take a long time. The entire world, including impoverished countries, have moved ahead of us in terms of self-preparation and adjustment. To do the necessary change we need to go back to the ways of our forefathers — cherishing hard work and celebrating the achievers and the talented.
The beginning should be from home, school and workplace. In the near past, the entire family members used to involve themselves in daily chores at home, farm or in the desert to shepherd camels and other livestock. Those members who did not participate in this collective work were looked down upon and disrespected by other members of the society. So, parents insisted that their grown up siblings — boys and girls — were with them in the farm, shop or in the desert to uphold the reputation of the family.
Presently, we have outsourced our daily chores — from farming, raising sheep and camels, plumbing, repairing broken doors to other mundane homework. We actually need to do those daily chores ourselves and also engage our children in them.
With respect to education, male and female students used to complete their elementary schooling with skills that enabled them to function in society normally. They could read fluently, write meaningfully with no spelling mistakes and do their math correctly. Moreover, students used to show respect to their teachers who could discipline them when they misbehaved or failed to do their homework with the support of their parents.
Education, nowadays, have adopted Western pedagogy that prohibit disciplining students with physical punishment for misbehaving or failing to do homework. As a result teachers are disrespected and attacked, which has led to students' poor performance.
We need to modify this new pedagogy, which was articulated for Western societies. These societies have learned lessons through painful experiences and as a result have become more developed than we are.
To make up for the shortcomings in the quality of education parents have turned to private schools. However, most of these schools are profit-focused and are keen to satisfy parents without giving much emphasis on the quality of education. Hence, many teachers have no compunction in giving students excellent grades despite the fact that most of them are unable to read or write and do not possess satisfactory skills in math and sciences.
Unfortunately, private colleges and universities established recently are also profit-oriented and some of them are engaged in the same practices — giving high grades to students who are not up to the mark. In fact, some private universities even award master’s degrees to students in vital specialties who do not have substantial knowledge.
Ultimately, most public-school graduates who enroll in pubic universities choose humanities and social sciences rather that vital science subjects. As for some private schools and university graduates, they find it difficult to further their graduate and undergraduate studies, specifically in the United States and Britain.
The practice of outsourcing our daily chores and the poor quality of education indicate that we prefer the easy way of life and do not want to compete with other nations in various areas of human endeavors. To confirm this, a widely distributed recent study has shown that Saudis rank in the third place among the laziest people around the world.
What we need to do to succeed in this competitive world is to get rid of this laziness and work hard as our forefathers did. We should also focus on education with specific emphasis on private schools and universities by tightening supervision on quality of education and the grade system.

n Dr. Abdulrahman Al-Zuhayyan is a Saudi academician based in Riyadh. This article is exclusive to Arab News.