The day he said not to the Defense Ministry portfolio
They gave him the Ministry of Defense portfolio, and he refused it. They offered him endowment and interior portfolios and he rejected both.
They were confused about him and gave him what he wanted, so he asked them shyly to give him the Ministry of Education.
In the evening, during the meeting in his diwaniya, his companions made fun of him for his ignorance, and his lack of understanding of his refusal to be the Minister of Defense or the Interior, where money, influence and power, or endowments, where there is reward and blessing, and how he chose a ministry burdened with problems, and no solution.
The Minister smiled and said to them: Let me assume the portfolio of the Ministry of Education, and within a few decades the Ministries of Defense and Interior, and the employees of all the other important ministries will be in our hands.
It is the change of thought and the way of understanding, and the implantation of specific religious partisan concepts in the minds of future generations, that will lead us to what we want, not the temporary influence and ephemeral money represented by holding the portfolio of this or that ministry.
What we see today of unsatisfactory outputs or not in line with the times and ideas that go back to times, concepts, way of life and a bygone era are nothing but the result of handing over all, I repeat all, the reins of education in the country, and over the past three or four decades to extremist and exaggerated religious forces in their ideas.
So, they controlled the ministry and the capabilities of its schools as they wanted, and from the partisan perspective, it was not wrong when its leaders chose to plant their undersecretaries and directors in all the joints of public, applied education, university, and even private education, and other training and educational bodies, and here we are reaping what we sowed.
As a result of the availability of these exaggerators in the education sectors, and the religious parties’ control over their activities, the recent electoral outcomes included greater numbers of hardline deputies compared to all previous Assemblies.
This will result in backwardness and regression in the conditions of the various ministries, bodies and state councils, and the low level of public taste, with the decline of culture, indifference to literature, and contempt for various arts, add to this the frightening unemployment from the outputs of graduates of religious education, and “Sharia” who refuse to work in any of the fields in which they “specialized” with their eyes set on investigations, prosecution and even judicial positions,
No one is to blame for the educational disaster we are experiencing, as is the blame for the successive governments that allowed religious parties to tamper with decisions for nearly half a century, despite the fact that most of the 25 Ministers of Education since independence until today were, metaphorically, liberals, but all of them did not have time to do something, or they were not allowed to interfere in the affairs of undersecretaries and their assistants who succeeded in adapting the methods of the various stages to suit their ambitions to reach their dangerous ends.
e-mail: a.alsarraf@alqabas.com.kw