Education Ministry's Mistake: Timing Error
Ten years ago, our confrontations with the Ministry of Education began due to its inability to stop cheating. Ironically, while we were hosting seminars to combat cheating, ministers boasted about inflated secondary school results. We subsequently filed complaints with the Public Prosecution, the first in 2016, which led to the Ministry being summoned. The Ministry then issued the “Zero for Cheating Students” decision, but cheating persisted, and we continued our pressure as an association. Three years ago, the Ministry referred cases of mass cheating to the Prosecution, revealing that 40,000 students were involved in cheating, and those managing cheating groups were fined a total of 3 million dinars. They were referred to the judiciary and sentenced to prison.
Perhaps the main factor behind the failure of the educational process over decades is the exploitation of the Ministry of Education by Members of Parliament as an electoral tool, given that it oversees more than 400,000 students, over 90,000 teachers, and more than 900 schools. They engaged in passing irregular appointments, transfers, and promotions.
We also clashed with the Ministry during the coronavirus pandemic and with the notorious Education Committee of the National Assembly, particularly regarding the Ministry’s decision to pass all students without exams. We exerted pressure and met with the Committee in the Council of Ministers to stop the tampering, reinstate paper exams, and halt the electronic exams in which hundreds of students achieved 100% success rates.
This introduction aims to make everyone aware that the burden left to the current Ministry is very heavy and has been inherited over decades, resulting in rampant corruption from partisan, tribal, and familial interventions in administrative and educational affairs. This explains the statement by the Deputy Undersecretary for Educational Affairs regarding transfer decisions, which shocked everyone.
Corruption did not start solely with the Ministry and the interventions of the National Assembly, but also with the outputs of basic education faculties, some of which suffer from significant deficiencies in training personnel. This has resulted in a weakened educational process and the deplorable protests we witnessed last week at the Ministry headquarters over transfer decisions, which revealed the low moral standards of some teachers.
Observers of achievements moving in the right direction may notice inaccuracies in the timing of some initiatives. Curriculum modifications last year, and the transformation of some subjects into unjustifiably difficult ones, occurred in a tight timeframe that delayed the delivery of textbooks, compounded by poor printing quality. Similarly, the decision to dismiss expatriate teachers, which was correct and something we repeatedly advocated for, came at an inappropriate time, at the start of the academic year, despite the possibility of dismissing them at the end of last year.
Then came the decisions to transfer thousands of teachers, which, according to specialists in the educational field, are among the most correct and courageous decisions made by the Ministry to eliminate the overcrowding of dozens of teachers in certain educational areas and address severe shortages in others. However, those who agreed on the correctness of the transfer decisions also agreed on the incorrectness of the timing, which could have been implemented before the start of last summer, especially since it coincided with road works that began with the academic year, causing severe traffic congestion.
This places the Ministry, whose reforms we appreciate, in a position of accountability to review one of the most important pillars of its decisions affecting hundreds of thousands: timing.
Today’s article is brief, intended to comment on the transfer decisions, as the Kuwait Association for Education Quality is preparing to publish a more detailed report on the restructuring of the entire educational process.
