In the First Year
Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani passed away last Sunday morning, and Qatar declared a four-day period of mourning. The newspapers wrote about gas, mediation, and the World Cup, but none of that came to mind for me, having spent years working on educational quality. What did come to mind was a single date: 1995.
In that year, Sheikh Hamad assumed power, and in the same year—not ten years later, and not after the state coffers had filled up—he established Qatar Foundation by emir decree.
Quality is not measured by speeches, nor by the models we fill out at the end of the year and then file away in a neat folder. The question is simpler: Where did you place education on your list of priorities, and how much were you willing to pay?
When Education City opened in October 2003, Qatar did not simply build a new university and give it a prestigious name. It did something harder. It brought the universities themselves. Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, and Weill Cornell Medical College came with their standards and their degrees. A student there does not receive a diluted local version.
Then came the money, because education cannot be built on intentions alone. The state committed to allocating 2.8 percent of its government revenues to scientific research. The Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development was established in 2006, followed by the Science and Technology Park in 2009, and then Hamad Bin Khalifa University in 2010.
Even public schools entered the experiment. The “Education for a New Era” project was launched, transitioning schools to the independent school model: autonomy in management in exchange for standards and accountability for results. Not every detail succeeded. They made mistakes and corrected them. But they entered the classroom.
Then the project transcended Qatar’s borders. From Doha, the “WISE” summit launched in 2009, and the “Education Above All” foundation, led by Sheikha Moza, contributed to enrolling more than 14 million out-of-school children in education across dozens of countries. A state with fewer than 300,000 citizens. Read that number again.
And read this record from the perspective of someone who knows the path, not from that of an onlooker. It is Kuwait that educated this Gulf. From the Mubarak School in 1911, to the Kuwaiti educational mission that landed in Sharjah in 1953 to open the first formal schools in the Trucial States, to the founding of Kuwait University in 1966. We are not a country searching for a beginning. The beginning was here. We have the university and the authority; we have the teacher and the student. We have the money, and we have an educational history that long preceded that of those around us. But what we lack is what we have been saying in the Kuwait Society for Educational Quality for years: that quality is not an administrative file, nor a conference that ends with a group photo.
Major decisions are made in the first year, not when the official has cleared everything else.
As for us, the people most worthy of remembrance are those who, one day, were the first to say it.
