Al-Jazirah In light of our current educational system and some of the practices and social traditions in our society which inhibit creativity and achievement, I am doubtful that we will ever produce creative scientists, especially in the fields of science and mathematics, which are vital for development. Does that mean we should give up and just continue to live with this reality? Of course not. Surely, achieving limited development here and there is not the solution we are looking for. In my opinion, we desperately need drastic changes that preserve our established values which we all agree on. The rest should be changed and improved. I believe that the most important aspects of change in this regard have to do with creating more options for our students. The more varied opportunities we make available to them, the higher their creativity and achievement levels will get. The problem with our public education system is that it attaches great importance to compatibility among students. Let me explain. Our schools have become factories that produce identical and compatible products (i.e. students). Any product that is not similar to the main production lines is immediately destroyed. If you were to monitor the production lines of a daily newspaper, you would find that some copies are destroyed because they are imperfect. Let us imagine that our schools offered various programs focusing on science, mathematics and languages. Today, we have schools that focus on the memorization of the Holy Qur'an among other subjects. We need schools with different programs and systems.
