Will and management
Other Voices
By Ahmad Al-Sarraf
YOUR Highness Prime Minister, I do not think one day I will be one of your advisers, and if that happens, I would only advise you to leave 90 percent of your daily ‘chores’ to your ministers and assistants and devote your time to reforming the backward declining educational system, neither because you are the best in this field and I am no better than you.
Your presence and support are important because you are able to remove any obstacle that hinders the work of the education minister and his technical staff.
One of the biggest mistakes in the formation of governments, especially in underdeveloped countries, such as Kuwait is treating the Minister of Education like every other minister and changing him constantly. This damages the system because to steady plan remains in place as a guide for the medium in the long run.
It is not difficult to remember the names of 20 ministers of education who have served the nation over the past half century, most of whom have left little impact behind them, perhaps because those who appointed them did not allow them to work or they were given the chance but were not given time. They were often from the religious circle so they caused more damage than repair.
Any teacher or university professor, even an employer, is aware that our education system is poor, backward and is a gradually declining system in spite of the billions of dinars spent on its development and modernization because we always complain about the bad output of poor education. To remedy this imbalance, attention must be paid to educational curricula, environment and school administration, development of teacher, evaluation and measurement that is to say the method and quality of student assessment and the educational policy.
Your Highness the Prime Minister, and Minister of Education, I would like to point out here that most of these aspects have never been taken into account by governments, perhaps because they feel that it takes time and effort to deal with them from the minister concerned, add to this what is achieved by a minister could be destroyed by his successor, because the terms in office of the education minister are short-lived.
Each of the above aspects requires intensive training programs and plans, acceptance from the authorities, and cooperation from the educational and administrative staff.
However, the main obstacle to the development process is the Teachers Association, which has been allowed by the authority to intervene continuously, and impede significant changes, if any, that is to say political intervention in the work of the ministry.
This is at the level of general education, while at the level of university education and the Faculty of Education, which prepare the teacher, it is necessary to make the curricula go in line with the five above axes in order to complete the development process.
The most important responsibility on the shoulders of the university is to adopt firm acceptance policies by increasing admission rates and to adopt TOEFL to allow only outstanding students join the university.
It is impossible to continue the policy of accepting tens of thousands of high school graduates in the university or the Public Authority for Applied Education and Training (PAAET) institutes, especially since most of them opt for easy specializations.
The outputs of the Kuwait University and the PAAET colleges in the labor market annually exceed the need of the market much because of the poor outputs and the monotony of specializations, such as sharia, education, social sciences, and even the law.
Some education experts believe the Al-Shaddadiya University should be restricted to those who excel in modern scientific subjects. We must also work to change the ‘culture of society’, which affects student options by making graduation from a scientific university a wonderful goal in itself.
These are just ideas, and we have many others which need to be listened to, but before that, we need a management capable of developing a clear modern education plan and a strong management to implement it.
email: habibi.enta1@gmail.com