Abolishing Faculties of Education and Forcing Students to Change Their Majors

For ten years, we have warned about the poor quality of outputs from certain basic education colleges, repeatedly calling for their abolition to save the public education sector. We noted that one reason for the failure of the educational process is the exploitation by members of the National Assembly of graduates from these basic education colleges as an electoral tool to push through appointments, transfers, and promotions for teachers. It is laughable to hear one of the worst members of the Council in the Education Committee call for appointing two department heads per department to accommodate the bloated number of teachers!

The information provided by the Minister of Education in his interview last week was shocking to many, citing the surplus of teachers as evidence of the corruption we have been fighting for years. He stated that there is a surplus of teachers, with an excess of 805 male teachers at the primary stage, while the surplus of female teachers across all primary stages reached 13,379 in the fields of Arabic language, Islamic education, sciences, physical education, and social studies. In the kindergarten stage, the surplus amounts to 1,992 female teachers. Thus, the Ministry of Education has become a station for fictitious employment, illegally hoarding teachers with virtually non-existent job functions. We hope the Minister will also reveal the extent of fictitious jobs in the administrative sector.

In July 2018, the Anti-Corruption Authority invited us to join a specialized technical committee to study the negative phenomena that marred the educational process and to develop a comprehensive plan to address them and issue recommendations to be submitted to the relevant state authorities. As the Nine Foundation, we presented nine pillars for combating corruption, proposing solutions, laws, and professional mechanisms to achieve this, including the creation of a new mechanism for preparing and qualifying teachers. This would begin by abolishing the current basic education colleges due to the flaws in some of their specialties, such as poor teaching and low academic achievement. Students wishing to become teachers would enroll in literary and scientific majors in the known departments of universities and the Applied Science University. After obtaining a university degree or diploma, they would join the Teachers’ Qualification Institute to obtain a teaching license and pass this professional test as a non-negotiable primary condition for admission to the teaching sector in the Ministry.

This is a message to the Council of Ministers to realize that we are in a predicament regarding the number of students at universities and the Applied Science Institute, as well as scholarship holders, in majors that are not desired in the labor market. We warned about this in previous years without success, including the accumulation of surplus teachers in the Ministry of Education and in other undesired specialties in some ministries. This requires implementing a real emergency plan that involves the immediate closure of scientific and literary departments related to undesired specialties in some colleges, halting scholarships, and forcing these students to change their majors immediately, even if they lose years of study. The country is facing internal developmental pressures and regional changes that require a genuine foundation for state-building. The government must not become a haven for fictitious employment, nor should we address shortages in desired specialties by hiring expatriate workers, as is the case in the medical sector.

Returning to education, the Council of Ministers should abolish basic education colleges and establish a professional institute for obtaining a teaching license as a primary condition for employment. Regarding all undesired jobs in state ministries, scholarships related to universities and the Applied Science Institute should be halted, and students should be forced to change their majors immediately.