Education: Facts and ambitions
Education has been the main topic of debates, conferences and strategies for long now, while the recommendations made have never been put into practice. This has made education so deteriorated that a former Ministry of Education (MoE) official described it as an inverted pyramid!
It has been upside down ever since and never been set straight. Successive ministers have taken responsibility of the education portfolio, but their views towards education remained the same, which has been having negative impact on students according to occasional international statistics and ranking that show our students at the tail end of the list.
We have the right to wonder about the reasons leading to such a situation. Do not the minister and MoE officials know those reasons? A simple answer to this is that unless the minister and ministry officials have true intentions to reform things, education will keep deteriorating in our beloved country. The last nail in our educational system’s coffin might probably be the decision to decrease expat teachers’ rent allowance. How on earth can such a decision involving the most sacred profession in any society be made?! Teachers must be actually and not just nominally distinguished.
Education problems in Kuwait mainly result from the educational environment and selecting teachers and school curriculums. To solve these problems, selected teachers must at least hold a master’s degree and have enough experience in the subjects they teach. These conditions are followed in Finland, which has the best educational system worldwide. Teachers must also be paid as much as doctors, engineers and lawyers, or even more.
In this regard, I recall a WhatsApp post that argues that if doctors can operate on a child’s heart to save his life, teachers have access to children minds and can enrich them with knowledge and science. Yes, indeed. This is what we need for our kids to have a proper learning environment to help them be creative and independent. So we need highly qualified, skilled and experienced teaching staffs, modern curriculums suitable for this age that encourage children to think logically.
Will our educationists realize such recommendations? We actually lack a real will to develop education and this is what got us so far, ending up with many improvised and random decisions such as decreasing expat teachers’ rent allowances. —Translated by Kuwait Times