Students in Japan study 243 days a year, which is the longest school year in the entire world. In Sweden, however, students attend school only 170 days a year, making it the shortest school year in the world.

In Saudi Arabia, the annual number of schooldays was supposed to be 180, but when you deduct two weeks of school due to swine flu, the number of schooldays falls to 166. Further to this, when you deduct the four-week examinations during the two semesters, the final result will be that there are only 138 schooldays a year.

According to the 10-year calendar issued by the Ministry of Education, there should be 180 schooldays this year, including the period for examinations. But in fact, these days were eroded before the start of the year by six weeks, including two weeks for swine flu and four weeks for examinations. When you deduct these six weeks (42 days) from the 180 days already scheduled by the ministry, the net schooldays will total only 138. This is, by all means, a low figure. This means that both our students and teachers will be idle for 227 days (not mentioning the additional 39 Thursdays and Fridays during the academic year).

I thought of comparing our schooldays with those of advanced countries and here is the result: Japan comes first in the number of schooldays with 243 days of study in a year, followed by China which has 241 days. Third is South Korea with 220, Israel is fourth with 215 schools days, then Germany and Russia with 210 days each, Switzerland with 207, and Holland, Scotland and Thailand with 200. It appears from these statistics that Saudi Arabia has the least number of schooldays among countries in the world. Even the already-low number of days (138) is liable to go down even more due to the usual absence of students during the first days of school, before examinations and at the beginning of each school semester. The sad thing is that this poor situation does not seem to improve, judging by the academic calendar issued by the ministry until the year 2018, which has the same number of days every year. We realize that the ministry finds it difficult to schedule classes between Islamic events (Ramadan and Eids) and those foreign commitments imposed by the Gregorian calendar. But whatever the situation might be, priority should be given to increasing schooldays, even if we have to open schools in the evenings. The reduction of our schooldays is a squandering of our educational energies and financial resources.

Please note that I have, so far, talked about the quantity, not the quality, of education, which is a different subject. Students in Japan, Germany and Russia are not only studying more than our students, but also receiving a better quality of education on account of strong syllabuses and a closer follow-up of individual student talents. If we cannot aspire to have a similar education, at least we can remind the Ministry of Education that quality is always more important than quantity.