‘Adopt honesty, ethics to avert disaster’

Other Voices

TBy Ahmad Al Sarraf

he government seeks to transform Kuwait into an attractive financial and commercial center in which the private sector will lead the economic activity, create competitiveness and enhance production efficiency under the umbrella of supportive government institutions that promote values, protect social identity and achieve human resource development as well as balanced development by providing adequate infrastructure, advanced legislation and a creative business environment.

This is a beautiful talk about the vision of Kuwait 2035. This is described in English as ‘Easier said than done’.

It is not difficult, of course, to develop an international zone under the sovereignty of the State of Kuwait, independent in all its affairs, legislation and finances and is run by an independent board of trustees to become the region’s most important logistics, commercial, tourism and financial gateway to the north of Gulf. But creating a model city with such standards cannot work well if the destruction of education continues, as is now the case.

It is painful to hear that no minister since the liberation of the country until today has been able to influence the curriculum or succeeded in changing even one sentence.

It is painful to know that not one minister of education since the liberation of Kuwait managed to leave positive effect in the curriculum or even change any part of them. It is painful to see that the average term of the most important ministers in the Government, the minister of education, does not exceed 18 months, most of the time is involved in the identification and management of the ministry and attending the meetings of the National Assembly, meetings with ministers, meetings with committees and other educational institutions.

This is in addition to the signing of official letters and correspondences, signing the approval for ‘wasta’. The year and a half then is exhausted without doing anything in the area of development, and even if he succeeds, the next minister will ‘destroy’ what he had built. This happened in essential issues and drafts of vital laws that have been cancelled once the relevant minister leaves his position.

It is said that a professor at a university in the Republic of South Africa wrote a note and put it on the entrance of the college, so that everyone can read it and keep it in mind on entry to the college in the morning of each day.

The note read: “Destroying any nation does not require the use of atomic bombs or the use of long-range missiles. It only requires lowering the quality of

Al-Sarraf

education and allowing cheating in the examinations by the students.” (This was a famous quote by the former president of South Africa, the late Nelson Mandela, when the tribes called for reservations).

The patient dies at the hand of a doctor who succeeds in cheating; houses collapse when an engineer managed to cheat; money is lost when an accountant succeeds in cheating in exams; religion dies because scholars had succeeded in cheating; justice is lost because the judge passed his exam by cheating. Rampant ignorance lies in the minds of children by a teacher who has succeeded in cheating. Therefore, the collapse of education means the collapse of the nation.

As I write the above text, I remember what a blogger wrote on Twitter attacking the Minister of Education, for transferring a principal of a secondary school from one urban area to another, to supervise the exams of that school and prevent her students from cheating! According to the blogger, this decision of the minister represented a devastation of the students’ future.

We conclude our article by saying that teaching excellence and teaching ethics is the one option that can save us from the coming catastrophe. All the edifices of 2035 will be empty, because of thousands of false diplomas, PhD degrees and others.

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