Mr. Jalal, do not resign!
We must tighten our belts. Agriculture can wait. We can halt treatment abroad, for our doctors are skilled and our hospitals are distinguished. We can make citizens pay a price, however minimal, for medicine and treatment. We can immediately eliminate subsidies and reduce spending on hundreds of other items. But when it comes to education, we must all exercise restraint and “speak softly.” Proper education requires a highly competent official, an outstanding teaching staff, ready schools, modern curricula, and generous spending. Education has never been a luxury in any country or society, to be stinted; rather, it is an obligation and a duty that precedes all others. It is the cornerstone for creating the good citizen upon whom the state can rely in the future—be he a doctor, engineer, teacher, or nurse. Our entire existence and standing among the nations of the earth depend entirely on the level of education. If we neglect it, both in terms of human resources and material support, and stint its funding, the cost will be exorbitant, perhaps even fatal, in the future. The damage will spread through every fabric of society, toppling the economy, shaking security, reducing productivity, and weakening competitiveness in a rapidly evolving and changing world. In the best-case scenario, we will end up as a failed rentier state, and nothing more. With the failure of education, everything else fails. This will deprive the state of its most precious human capital. The class gap will widen, health awareness will weaken, and society will transform into a fertile environment for extremism and ideological recruitment. Efforts to combat corruption will vanish, crime and deviance will multiply, and our human wealth will dwindle. Many poor countries in every respect, such as Korea, Cape Verde, Singapore, and Finland, have become rich thanks to education alone. Others, rich in currency and natural resources, have declined due to the backwardness of their education systems. The price of poor education is not merely financial; it is compound debt that accumulates silently across generations, and its full impact is not felt until decades later, when correcting it becomes far more difficult and costly than if we had invested early. As the saying goes: If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
It is not my right to demand Mr. Jalal’s resignation, for reasons that are not hidden from the discerning. However, the state of “education” is indeed dire. It is unjust to blame a single individual or entity, given that most of our governments since the 1960s have participated in creating this negative accumulation. Consequently, the remedy has become far greater than the capacity of “Mr.” Jalal, or anyone else. It was expected that he would recognize the difficulty of the task. Especially since, in my view, he failed to accomplish even the easiest matters, such as providing the books that are still missing, and equipping schools and supplying them with well-trained teachers. How much more so with matters that are more complex, serious, and urgent? In this context, I can understand his decision to dismiss thousands of teachers on the grounds that they are not needed. But what is to be done with the 33,000 teachers in the Ministry of Awqaf (Endowments)?
This patchwork we see in “education,” we have seen a similar pattern in “Kuwait Petroleum” for more than half a century. The result was that we lost more than ten billion dollars, only to discover that the solution lay in “thinking outside the box.” Therefore, what we need in the matter of education is to think outside the box. The state has previously hired several “specialized and international” entities to develop the “education” systems. However, as is said, they failed in their tasks. In my opinion, the reason was our inability to understand their objectives and our refusal to cooperate with them, often due to “certain interventions.” The evidence is that these same entities succeeded in developing education systems in many countries, including Gulf sister states. Furthermore, the majority of complaints from senior executives of private companies focus on the weak outputs of our universities and schools, and their lack of analytical spirit, challenge, and critical thinking. They predominantly perform routine tasks, collect their salaries, and demand promotions and performance evaluations.
“Exceptionally impressive!” This is what Baroness Smith, the UK Minister of State for Education, said during her visit to the Saudi Education Quality Assurance and Control Center. Ahmed Al-Sarraf
