Time to reform our education system

For many decades, our political leadership has given due attention to the improvement of the Kingdom’s education system in an attempt to create well-educated generations who could confidently face challenges of the future.
We all know that education is the key to progress. Saudi Arabia is no exception because any civilized nation would attach huge important to education to survive in this competitive and fast-changing world. But in the last decade development took more serious trajectories covering more areas. It is, therefore, not surprising to see four reshuffles in the portfolio of the Education Ministry since 2015.
The purpose of these ministerial changes is the implementation of the scientific plan for upgrading the Ministry’s mechanism. The fact that four ministers were changed during one year doesn’t mean failure but it means that expectations are very high and the government is making all-out efforts to upgrade teaching standards and to ensure continuity of the development process.
Continuity doesn’t mean to feel content and satisfied with the last stage of development, but rather to pursue more development by continuously following the latest global trends.
Educators, organizations, officials, planners, administrators and all other stakeholders should recognize that today’s generations are different from ours, so the tools of addressing them and meeting their needs must be different too. We have to admit that our traditional practices and old curricula are useless and short of addressing the intellectual needs of our children.
The mere presence of textbooks that build students morally and culturally, at the cost of the scientific content, is a step backward because information presented to them through the official curriculum is easily available from other platforms.
This writer is not against religious education but the methods should be changed to groom the personalities of students. Religious education should motivate students to acquire more scientific and cultural knowledge qualitatively and not quantitatively. Focus should be on mathematics and English because they are the requirement of advancement and innovation.
Hence, it is high time that we started reviewing our curricula; otherwise we cannot move any further.