CEO of social enterprise Silatech Tarik Yousef, who served for five years as the founding dean of the Dubai School of Government, told Arab News that quality, not quantity, is the key to building an effective system anywhere in the world, not just the Kingdom.
“Education in Saudi Arabia is not going to be about building schools and hiring teachers. It cannot be that,” he said on the sidelines of a discussion on education and change in the Arab world at the third World Innovation Summit for Education in the Qatari capital, which kicked off on Tuesday.
“It has to be about what you’re trying to achieve, what signals your labor market is sending, what are your economic structures producing? That is the core question here. I think what we end up celebrating often in terms of investments in education are things that in fact reinforce the very same symptoms or the very same institutions and incentives.”
Yousef suggested at the session that the Arab Spring revolutions affecting several countries such as Egypt and Libya could be used as a catalyst for instigating radical reforms of education systems in the region to better serve youth by, for example, making them less focused on the long-term.
When asked whether stable countries in the region such as Saudi Arabia would also follow suit, Yousef claimed such changes could be regionwide. “Look at countries such as China and Singapore. These are not necessarily countries that would be held up as examples of open participatory political systems. But they’ve got internally very accountable systems,” he said. “That accountability has allowed them to produce systems of education that are vibrant and dynamic. So what is China and Singapore exactly doing? I think that is the question, what countries that are unable or still at late stages or latecomers to the game in terms of political change or political reform can invest in.”
Yousef was joined at the session by Salah-Eddine Kandri, who heads the Education for Employment initiative at the International Finance Corporation; and Muhammad Faour, a senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Lebanon.
Kandri claimed 50 to 70 million youths were soon expected to flood the labor market in the Middle East and North Africa region alone. He also said that while 1 in 4 people were out of work in the Arab region, there was a higher unemployment rate of just under a third among women.
He identified that there was a faulty perception that “higher education is where people need to go,” adding that vital professions such as electricians, plumbing and nursing tended to be marginalized.
He also stressed that private and charity sectors needed to get involved in helping improve education in their respective countries, giving special mention to job creation programs featured at social organizations such as Bab Rizq Jameel in the Kingdom.
Faour suggested teachers in the region were treated badly compared to their counterparts in other parts of the world, adding that they had a “lower status.” He said their social status needed to be elevated and focus given to their self-development and training in order to improve and maintain their creativity and enthusiasm levels.
Bad management of teachers was one factor contributing to sub-par education systems in the region, he said. The other was bad central governance of schools.