Dr. Khaled M. Batarfi When I was the managing editor of Al-Madinah daily, we hosted a number of senior students from the media department of a local public university. We put them through a few tests to help us decide which departments of the newspaper they could join for their summer training. The results were shocking! Most of them couldn't write a single paragraph in a news story without grammar, style and spelling mistakes. Their Arabic was terrible, and don't ask about English (some of them couldn't differentiate between “is” and “are”). Typing and computer skills were as bad. Their Internet abilities were better, but that was due to personal interest, not to college training. The results of the general knowledge test were unbelievable. Few could tell who the prime minister of Saudi Arabia was! Many were not familiar with the map of the Kingdom, and some couldn't list the GCC countries or tell how many members there were in the Arab League. We became more and more desperate. We were not expecting knowledge of world events, or even local issues. All we hoped for was to find enough trainees able to read and write Arabic at an acceptable level, to speak well in public or even in private, to ask a coherent journalistic question, to do a simple report or make a Power Point presentation and to be at least serious and punctual! Not everything is wrong with our education system, but the output is not good enough - not for higher education, not for the job market. As a professor, I suffer from the products of our public school system. It breaks my heart to find our kids lost on the road of modern education. They come from a system that exclusively teaches official textbooks and encourages memorizing, and has little regard for research, scientific experiment or independent thinking. All they are trained for is to follow specific orders: Read chapter 7, answer questions 1 to 8, and repeat what I say! Graduates of international and some private schools fare much better. This proves that the problem is not with our students, but with the public education system. We should also include as a culprit our loose culture: parents, family and society. Discipline, for example, and respect for the system are values that should be taught in school and out of school, as well. Where is the role of home, mosques, sports clubs and social organizations? Education is a whole, complete package in which all parts work hand in hand to produce the best results. Dr. Rashid Small, my South African colleague in Prince Sultan College, Alfaisal University, comments on my last article “Quality Education: How can we get there?” (May 14). He writes (and I agree): “The question of the quality of education has been lost in the swamp of information generation and the educational economic and the emergence of the education industry. “Education has been changed by the information generation and the economics around the value of information. You so rightly pointed out that it is not the volume of education that is important but the quality and value it contributes to the quality of life of the individual and society. “The problem arose both in the Islamic and Western world when education was separated from the religious values of the individual and society. Education has ignored the humanistic element which was present in previous educational systems and was replaced by the notion that the volume of information will enhance the quality of life of the person. “The quality of education is driven by three core principles, viz. (i) the value added to the culture and life of the individual, society and community; (ii) the usefulness of the information in sustaining the livelihood of the individual, family, community and society; and (iii) its application to improve and enhance the livelihood of the individual, family and society. “What is wrong with the educational system in non-Westernized societies such as Africa and the Middle East? My personal opinion is that we do not value the contribution in knowledge which our people have made to the global society. This is the reason we are always looking to Western systems for guidance and success formulas. Mathematics and science have their roots in the Arab and Islamic world but we have not continued our scholarly activities which were driven by the need to improve the quality of the life of the people. “In my humble opinion, the educational system has been usurped by corporate profit greed and is no longer concerned with the societal well-being of mankind. Can we reverse the situation? Yes, if we reassess the goals of education at a micro level and then project it onto the macro level. We, in Africa and the Middle East, unfortunately, are always looking at the macro level which may not be applicable at the micro level.” — Dr. Khaled Batarfi is a Saudi writer based in Jeddah. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @Kbatarfi
