Improving education system

I have tried not to use the term of changing the coach, as it has been the case with our sports clubs. But in fact I had no option but to use it. When using this concept, I don’t mean to be sarcastic or critical; rather it is an attempt from my part to find out where is the flaw.
During the past two years, the minister of education has been changed more than once, but we failed to solve the problems of our educational system.
This is because many stakeholders are involved — the ministry and its management (the sports club), the body of the educational system (the coach and his assistants), the students (the players) or the crowd (the parents).
Frankly speaking all of these players are accountable without exception because success of the educational process is inseparable and any malfunction in this structure will definitely lead to a total failure.
It is strange in our case that any new minister of education takes random decisions without taking teachers into consideration. It is true that everyone talks about reforms and development but we don’t see tangible results because achieving the required results is a comprehensive process involving families, the ministry, the teachers, the curriculum, the labor market, universities, private schools and equipment and technology etc.
The problem is not unsolvable but is interconnected. We can’t, for example, hold the ministry fully responsible, because others too should carry out their responsibilities.
There is no denying to the fact that most countries in the world are facing problems in the educational field, but the magnitude of their problems is different and temporary. However, our major problem is that we are still undisciplined intellectually.
In every production operation there is always what is called conformity. If we suppose that the educational process is a national product, this means that it should enjoy a certain percentage of conformity. Certainly, intentional or unintentional accidents do happen from time to time but they can be corrected when discovered. Unfortunately, conformity in teaching in the Kingdom has itself become the product. A close look will definitely show that the product of the private or international schools is somehow better than that of the public sector. Although the gap is not big, it shows that there is defect in our baseline. The indicator of this defect is that achievements of majority of the expatriates’ children, either those who are born in the Kingdom or those coming from other countries, are better than the achievements of the Saudi students. Not only this, but some expatriate parents started to complain that the academic level of their children has started to decline after coming to the Kingdom.
Undoubtedly, there are many different solutions to this problem, but we have a problem as far as persistence and mechanism of implementation is concerned. We should first of all avoid positive competitiveness. To say that those having academic degree have more job opportunities than others is unrealistic, because many of our graduates are jobless. The reason for this is that a university degree is not enough to get a job in the labor market, if they lack the required skills and adequate training.
I believe the solution is to build a refined and well-educated new generation who will be able to nurture their children in a way that is different from ours. Families in such generation will believe that their children have the right to learn and punish their children if they misbehave with their teachers or peers.
Once we succeed in reforming the family and the society, we could pay attention to other tools of education, mainly the teaching staff. The families will then start demanding high quality teaching for their children and they will not accept that their level of achievement will go down. Consequently, this will force the ministry to do its best to meet these demands. To achieve the best outcomes, everybody will have to cooperate to develop the curriculum that is suitable for the present and the future. In the new setting, the mentality and dealing with the students will change from that of the military discipline to a more attractive and magnetic style.
We are in 2016, and many countries in the world have distant and online teaching facilities, in our country we find principals who confiscate mobile phones from students or punish a student for taking a picture of his teachers in the classroom.
What makes us so optimistic about the future is that our government is making education a top priority and is providing it all possible assistance. But this assistance doesn’t mean spending 80 percent of the ministry’s budget as salaries. Instead we would like to see the Project for the Development of Public Education involve all the stakeholders in the reform process so that everybody gets engaged and shoulders responsibility.