Engaging Society to Reform Arab Education: From Schooling to Learning
Nathan J. Brown and Marwan Muasher, editors
Contributing Authors
Arab educational systems need to serve the needs of pluralistic societies and foster the development of active, responsible citizens who are empowered to deal with complexity and advance constructive change. Current systems focus on quantitative indices rather than quality and therefore fail to meet this goal. This is leading to increasingly strong criticism. The 2016 Arab Human Development Report stated simply and starkly: “Overall, the quality of education is poor.”1
Shelves of international reports connect shortcomings in the region’s school systems with unemployment and lack of preparation for looming economic challenges. But this understanding of the problem—focused on how schools need to prepare students for the economy—while accurate, is far too narrow. Reform should focus not only on schools but also on the way that societies engage education. It is not merely economic progress and the workplace that are at stake (though they are), but also political stability and social peace.
However, a broader understanding of the extent of the problem does not lead to despair. In fact, when taking a holistic approach to reform, there is much room for imaginative, constructive, and hopeful suggestions. Reform should not just involve making a set of specific changes in existing school curricula to meet the needs of today’s labor market. Instead, the focus must be on an effort to move society at all levels—political leadership, public officials, teachers, students, and parents and communities—to develop visions for education in their own societies. Such visions need to be based less on what material should be taught in schools and more on how to foster a learning process that integrates what takes place in the classroom, outside of the classroom, in the workplace, in leisure, and long after graduation.
Failing to move from a narrow focus on schooling to a broader and society-wide process of learning will result in generations of unproductive citizens. And concentrating on the first part of that phrase (emphasizing the economic contribution of education) while forgetting the second part (stressing citizenship or the broad societal contributions of education) is both morally troubling and ultimately self-defeating.
Even when just considering the all-too-narrow goal of educating or instilling knowledge of specific material for participation in today’s workforce, it is clear that systems, for the most part, perform inadequately. Youth unemployment and the resulting alienation remain major problems throughout the region. Pockets of excellence exist, but the quality of education varies so greatly that it reinforces rather than overcomes inequalities. Teachers receive little of the support and continuing training that they need. And the stress on the workforce and economic factors, while understandable, cannot obscure that the systems neglect all other aspects of growth related to engaged learning, individual empowerment, and especially social participation and active citizenship (including values connected to democracy and human rights).
With such profound challenges, technocratic solutions will fall far short. Educational experts can identify clear problems, drawing on international and regional knowledge. This helps with diagnosis but does not point to easy solutions. Often, there is a need to explore educational fields in areas where mechanical copying of curricula and material from other regions does not help. There may not be uniquely Iraqi physics or chemistry (though even in such subjects, simple reproduction of material developed for different societies serves education poorly), but there are Iraqi histories, societies, and cultures. Recommendations for reform must therefore combine general guidelines and proposals with suggestions for specific initiatives that might vary in their details even within the same region.
To be fair, Arab states have realized some real successes in building school systems that have encompassed much of their societies. But they have done so according to an implicit contract in which states provide services and citizens reciprocate with quiescence. That makes it possible to defend the existing school systems on several grounds, but generally only by citing indices of quantity rather than quality of learning. In most countries, educational systems have been expanded out from cities to serve villages, rural areas, and refugee camps; they have taught basic literacy to most of the population (raising youth literacy rates above 90 percent in most Arab states and largely closing a long-standing gender gap in that area).2 Millions of students have graduated each year with a variety of skills that have allowed them to populate various bureaucratic structures, professions, and other activities. The gender gap is closing in areas beyond basic literacy as well. In most states, women outnumber men in pursuing university degrees.3
And many school systems continue to produce large numbers of graduates even while operating in extremely difficult fiscal and political environments—difficult in some countries not only because state resources are so limited but also because some existing regimes have failed to prioritize education or betray broader governance problems that afflict many sectors, including education. But the problem is not just fiscal or political. Even government officials in well-established and wealthier states who have invested heavily in education (with some allocating one-fifth of their overall budget) show frustration with the uneven results.4
Arab educational systems do not—and indeed are not designed to—foster democratic and engaged citizenship in all of its aspects. Rather than focus on learning more broadly, most of them center more narrowly on the acquisition of defined and approved bodies of knowledge. School systems are designed to use specific academic material, and as a result, teachers are encouraged to impart lower-level cognitive skills (recall and comprehension) at the expense of higher-level ones (application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and critical thinking). The systems therefore produce graduates with credentials but not the range of skills necessary to deal with the political, economic, and social challenges faced by Arab societies—or even to meet the needs of the workplace, which is the purported goal of many recent reform efforts.
Indeed, for all the extensive school infrastructure built in Arab countries, overall student learning is disappointing, both by national and international standards. (See the Haichour interview for quantitative measures of Arab educational systems.)
Interview
How Does Arab Education Measure Up?
El Houcine Haichour is the chief executive officer of Thazra Learning Services and is an expert on human development, education reform, youth, and technology in the Middle East and North Africa.
What are the best metrics to understand how Arab educational systems are performing? According to those metrics, how is the Arab world performing?
The most reliable metrics to measure the performance of the education systems in the Arab region are the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). There are no measures without critics, so it makes sense to look across several measures. These international assessments have become the standards that allow us to measure learning outcomes across participating countries. The tests do not measure everything that an educational system is about, including the promotion of citizenship and the development of moral ethics, leadership, grit, responsibility, and so on; but for the areas that they assess, the international tests have proven to be very solid metrics. And participation in these assessments is itself an indication of how open the system’s leaders are to accountability.
In the latest iteration of PIRLS, which measures the literacy skills of fourth graders, many of the top-performing countries—notably Finland, Ireland, Russia, and Singapore—have significant numbers of students scoring at the advanced level; while in some Arab countries, an alarming number of students could not reach even the basic level.1 The Arab region cannot win the future if a large proportion of the students cannot perform elementary tasks.
The level of performance of the students from the Arab region in the PISA and TIMSS—which test the knowledge and skills of fifteen-year-old students and the math and science achievements of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders, respectively—is no different. Interestingly, girls outperform boys in some of these tests. Defying stereotypes, according to the 2016 PIRLS, Saudi Arabia had the highest gender gap in the world in favor of girls.
Test results aside, the decision by some countries in the region—such as the UAE, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Oman— to participate in the international tests is a laudable one. It takes a lot of political courage to display to the world the level of capabilities of a nation’s students.
Is the problem a lack of resources?
States vary in their generosity with education, with some countries in the region spending close to 25 percent of their national budgets on education and some much less. The discrepancy between public investment in education and the learning outcomes achieved by the students is perplexing.
In absolute terms, some education budgets seem very large; but when we analyze these budgets by line items, we see that the lion’s share of the budget goes to paying salaries of the teachers and other personnel. Little in the budget is left for investing in professional development, equipping teachers and students with modern technologies, building science labs, or improving the physical environment of the schools. Ideally, more resources should be allocated to capital investment. But a smarter solution may be more efficient use of the existing resources, at least in the short term. And teachers have to be at the center of that.
Can you go a bit further in this diagnosis? What do you think are the underlying reasons for the poor performance?
Two reasons stand out as having a negative impact on the performance of the educational system in the region. The first of these reasons relates to the status of the teaching profession itself; while the second relates to overall governance of the educational system.
In high-performing countries, teaching is a highly valued profession, where high school graduates compete to enter the faculties of education, undergo a long and challenging preparation in both subject matter and in pedagogy, and receive intensive professional development and support in and out of school throughout their careers. In many Arab countries, the teaching profession is not a highly valued profession: pay-wise, socially, or professionally. As a result, the profession does not attract the best talent that the system needs.
With respect to governance, accountability for performance is weak at all levels of the system in many Arab countries. The region needs to devise smarter ways of holding not just teachers but also school and system leaderships accountable for student performance. Signs of change have begun to emerge across the region, however. Some countries have set up independent evaluation entities, reporting directly to the head of state to improve the accountability of the system. Notable examples of such organizations include the Education Evaluation Commission in Saudi Arabia and the National Evaluation Agency in Morocco.
El Houcine Haichour is the chief executive officer of Thazra Learning Services and is an expert on human development, education reform, youth, and technology in the Middle East and North Africa.
Notes
1 United Nations Development Program, Arab Human Development Report 2016: Youth and the Prospects for Human Development in a Changing Reality (New York: UNDP, 2016), 31, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/2699/ahdr2016en.pdf.
And even the positive accomplishments of the past are now threatened by a tumultuous and violent regional environment with large refugee populations, state decay in some places, and fiscal pressures in others. Regimes have come to regard burgeoning youth populations throughout the region as looming threats rather than agents of a better future. Even in those societies that have escaped some of the political turmoil of recent years, senior officials in ministries of education feel that they are simply treading water at best; teachers are asked to educate students in a society that denies them adequate respect, status, and opportunities for professional improvement; and the many meaningful learning activities that take place outside of the formal system—widely recognized as a critical element of any educational system—are poorly tracked and difficult to mainstream in the Arab world.
To be sure, there are efforts at educational reform throughout the region, and positive experiences and imaginative experiments must receive attention. But many reformers complain that they are blocked by highly bureaucratized, rigid, and authoritarian organizational arrangements that mostly rely on large-scale, top-down approaches. Well-intentioned past efforts have often failed to attend to the complexities of implementation; neglected the concerns, voices, and priorities of the key stakeholders; lacked strategic vision; and been divorced from any well-articulated and substantiated pedagogical framework. Furthermore, many of these initiatives have been triggered and supported by international agencies and donor countries and are thus perceived as being driven by economic and political agendas rather than local visions.
Yet, despite these pressures, there are agents for positive change throughout existing systems: educators who care deeply about their work, officials who devise innovative solutions, and students who display imagination and have aspirations. That makes it possible to identify some promising experiments and to suggest avenues for mainstreaming them throughout the region and within education systems.
In this paper, we survey the field and the possibilities for reform, beginning with schools themselves, progressing to the official framework in which they operate, and concluding with an emphasis on the entire society.5
The School: Engaging Teachers and Students
Schools are at the center of debates about values, religion, identity, gender, and race—and states have therefore treated them as places where they must exercise their authority. They do so through closely controlling the content of curriculum. This creates two risks: that school systems will be overly centralized and therefore insulated from key stakeholders and mechanisms of accountability to society and that education will be built upon a mistaken understanding of how students learn.
In most Arab states, senior state officials and bodies determine an authoritative set of truths and a codified national and/or religious identity. The educational bureaucracy translates such authoritative determinations into the curriculum. Teachers transmit that to students, who are then examined on how well they have absorbed it. For instance, “national education” is a subject in Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine, and the texts rely on a single, official version of history and politics.6 It is not just the desire for stability and control that leads to centralization. Top-down approaches are also motivated by a desire to reform education to meet the needs of a globalized economy. And officials focus on educational content to ensure uniformity and control, so that even reform efforts are overly centralized.
The result has often left educators and learners feeling that their only choice is between becoming either blind imitators or fervent rejecters of “foreign” ideas. In both these cases, the educational system keeps graduating too many disengaged citizens, angry rebels open to destructive ideas, and potential emigrants longing to leave their society behind. Too many chase an idealized version of the “other” (associated with moral and technological superiority) rather than contribute to their own societies.
Such approaches do not merely fail to realize their intended results in the short term; they prevent schools and teachers from helping students develop the skills that will enable them to learn outside of school and long after graduation. Current and future citizens must be able to negotiate differences and engage each other constructively. The current systems, based on the inculcation of officially endorsed knowledge, obstruct that goal.
Moreover, these approaches can lead to very mixed messages, as students are sometimes given a patriarchal vision of family life in one subject and an egalitarian one in another—and without the tools to probe the differences or negotiate their way in societies where many past sources of authority are crumbling. Further, curricula often sidestep significant issues, including communal tensions, religious disagreements, gender discrimination and disparities (particularly among poorer populations), and many other entrenched social problems that are deemed too sensitive for schools.
Two broad developments in the international understanding of education over the last three to four decades have helpful implications for educational reform in the Arab world, including for pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment.
First, experts have come to understand education differently—as something that emerges from, and takes place in, a social context rather than from a simple transfer of a body of knowledge to pupils. “Knowledge” is not simply a set of cold facts but something that members of a society develop collectively and argue about. Students should be seen as apprentices—being guided into becoming full and participating members of their communities—rather than receptacles. There is a change from an “acquisition of knowledge” understanding of education to a participation metaphor of learning—one that focuses on the interactive and social nature of sound education more than the simple transfer of information.
Second, the aims of education have moved beyond the emphasis on knowledge retention and recall to assisting students to think and read critically, express themselves clearly and persuasively, and solve complex problems in science, mathematics, and other areas.
These changes are not merely philosophical; there is now a better understanding of what underlies people’s abilities to solve problems, how to enable students to use what they have learned in new settings, how cultural and social norms affect learning, how students’ prior knowledge and abilities interact with learning, and how to use technology to guide and enhance learning.
In many countries, the new demands of workplaces and active participation in a democratic society have contributed to these developments. This is based on a new understanding of the workplace. Older approaches view it as a place where a labor force with specific credentials is required. That has led to a special focus on mathematics, technology, and science—welcome, to be sure, but unfortunately understood as technical subjects to be mastered rather than as ways of thinking to be cultivated.
Overall, the rapid growth of knowledge requires school graduates to be able to find and use information rather than simply recall it. That is, there is a need now for graduates to be autonomous learners throughout their lives. Thus, more appropriate educational systems are ones in which teachers guide students in addressing problems constructively as participants, citizens, and lifelong learners—in particular by equipping them to operate in societies characterized by differences over values.
There is another unrelated effect of the stress on technical subjects. It has distracted attention from—and even risked devaluing—the social sciences and humanities, which are precisely where the essential matters of identity, citizenship, and pluralism can be discussed directly. (See the Karami-Akkary interview for a description of the TAMAM project, a specific reform initiative, and the al-Khadra interview on the need for humanities education more broadly.) With much less focus on such subjects in the curriculum, educators have fewer resources and are required (often by the testing system) to fall back on rote learning.
Interview
Constructive Citizenship and School-Based Reform
Rima Karami-Akkary is an associate professor of educational administration, policy, and leadership in the Department of Education at the American University in Beirut and is the director of the TAMAM initiative, funded by a grant from the Arab Thought Foundation.
You have been involved in a research and development project called TAMAM (consisting of the initials for “school-based reform” in Arabic, Al-Tatwir al-Mustanad ila al-Madrasa). Can you tell us about it?
Based on research conducted in the TAMAM project, many Arab educators at all levels of the system agree that the profile of a graduate should revolve around constructive citizenship—and that to achieve this profile, a student should become an agent of change; a continuous and reflective learner; an innovative and critical thinker; and a promoter of ethical social responsibility. Developing these competencies starts with designing, at the school level, holistic learning experiences that target the development of the child’s cognitive, emotional, social, and moral capacity. The competencies should enable him/her not only to assume membership in their communities but also to lead the transformation to a more tolerant, equitable, and just society.
The above cannot be achieved under the existing Arab educational systems. It requires a learning ecosystem that supports transforming schools into sociocultural learning communities, with responsive structural arrangements that enable leadership development and sustainable transformational learning among all its members. What should characterize these schools is strong partnerships with parents and, just as much, with members of their broader local communities, including nongovernmental organizations and institutions of higher education. These partnerships need to facilitate the exercise of concerted efforts that focus on designing strategies that target the emerging needs of students, support them on their learning journey, and enhance the needed learning of organizations at all levels. In this learning ecosystem, learning becomes pivotal not only as an outcome but also as a process that all of society engages in.
How do you pursue such reform?
Triggering action toward this ideal starts at the school level (and not just through massive curriculum reform). It begins with building school capacity for sustainable improvement through capitalizing on the existing potential and drive of members of the school community. The TAMAM project strategy includes inviting the school to form leadership teams—one each for educators, community members (with strong parent representation), and students. The student leadership team is conceived as an experiential learning experience on citizenship, as well as a forum that ensures that the voice of these students is integral to school-based initiatives for improvement.
The first step is the careful selection of members for each team, which involves looking for potential as much as for demonstrated abilities and dedication to change and social responsibility. Team members work collaboratively under a shared platform for professionals and based on shared concerns and aspirations. The second step consists of initiating a process of improvement that is based on a thorough needs assessment and consensus of what constitutes a pressing priority to be addressed. The focus always remains on the ultimate goals of enhancing learning and achieving the desired graduate profile.
Once the goals for improvement are selected, team members receive ongoing and responsive on-the-job professional development on inquiry, critical reflection, and collaborative evidence-based decisionmaking. They also learn the pedagogic skills needed to implement their innovative intervention; how to plan, monitor, and evaluate improvement initiatives; and how to navigate the existing systemic obstacles to change while implementing these initiatives. In addition, they learn how to evaluate the impact of their initiatives through critically examining the quality of their design and their effectiveness in achieving their goals, as well as testing for impact.
With their acquired leadership skills, team members will engage in proposing and demanding structural changes that will help institutionalize what has proven to be effective in their initiatives. By the end of a cycle (bringing one improvement to completion), the school will have increased its capacity for sustainable improvement through dispersing leadership rather than focusing all authority at the top; empowering teachers to be agents of change; building a process for continuous self-examination and renewal; and cultivating a leadership team that has experienced success and acquired and demonstrated the skills needed to be role models of constructive citizenship. Students who contributed to the project as part of a leadership team will have gained experience in generating change, and those who were still in the observer seat will have the chance to experience membership in these learning communities. This experience allows students to become concerned and engaged citizens within their school community, with the capacity and promise to become transformative leaders in their societies.
The two problems—understanding science and mathematics as a set of information to be transferred and the neglect of other subjects—often stem jointly from a good-faith attempt to be current but a misplaced emphasis on what current realities suggest should receive attention.
Past reform in the Arab world has focused on the content of the curriculum and that is indeed important, but it is not the only issue. It is how such subjects are taught (pedagogy) and who teaches (teachers) them that affect much of what is learned. Indeed, this is precisely what should unite all parts of the system across the range of academic subjects from literature to chemistry. Instead of attempting to deliver answers from the top, Arab education should allow teachers to guide students in learning how to address problems constructively as participants, citizens, and lifelong learners. They must do so even, or in particular, in societies increasingly characterized by differences over some core values. (See the Karami-Akkary interview for an attempt to grapple with the need to develop citizenship skills.)
The best approach marries an array of necessarily related approaches in the educational experience, pursuing them simultaneously: learning to learn, learning for individual empowerment, learning to solve problems with others, and learning about values.
Assessment techniques now in place serve to monitor and control what takes place in schools, augmenting the tendencies of systems to be top-down structures aimed at inculcating facts. The current approach misdirects teacher energies from cultivating learning to instilling specific material. Instead, testing should be reconceived to emphasize more than simple mastery of a subject material. Teachers should be trained as agents rather than intermediaries, or, even better, facilitators, in helping students learn and in identifying and overcoming challenges to the learning process. New appropriate teaching and testing approaches will have to renew the focus on quality. (See the Hashweh interview for a set of suggestions about reforms in pedagogy.)
Interview
Pedagogy for Citizenship
Maher Hashweh is a professor of education at the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Birzeit University in Palestine.
What does research on pedagogy tell us?
Over the last several decades, a new vision of teaching and learning has arisen that emphasizes developing project- and problem-based learning tasks and other student-centered and active learning methods; designing relevant, real-world learning activities; and using a mix of whole class teaching, collaborative small group work, and individual work or one-on-one tutoring. Moreover, discussion, argumentation, and student questioning have become valuable teaching methods. Finally, there is a need to capitalize on students’ interest in mobile technologies and make the most of social media.
How do teachers use this new pedagogy?
This change in teaching and learning has redefined teachers’ roles and necessitates changes in teacher knowledge, skills, and beliefs. Teachers must develop strong subject-matter knowledge and a repertoire of new teaching methods—many of which require the design of complex learning environments and delegation of authority by the teacher to the students—such as monitoring and controlling their behavior in small groups without the presence of the teacher. Radical changes need to be made in pre-service teacher education programs. Innovative teacher education programs require considerable capacity building of schools of education in Arab universities. This mainly involves faculty development, either through recruiting new well-qualified faculty members or facilitating the professional development of existing faculty, especially by exposing them to recent global trends in education, developing their research abilities, and encouraging them (with adequate salaries to avoid the need for moonlighting and providing resources for research) to publish in international, refereed, prestigious journals.
The teaching profession needs to become more attractive so that the more academically able students enroll in teacher education programs.
What can educational systems do to prepare teachers for these new roles?
Meaningful professional development programs need to be designed—programs that are grounded on the modern conceptualization of learning and teaching. These programs should cater to the needs of teachers, emphasize disciplinary knowledge, support teachers who wish to try out new approaches, and encourage collaboration among teachers. Establishing professional development schools—which emphasize collaboration between university faculty and teachers in order to facilitate pre-service teacher education, in-service teacher professional development, and field-based research—is one way of ameliorating both in-service and pre-service teacher education.
The new teaching approaches require empowering teachers, and this means affording them more trust and freedom in their work. School principals need to become educational leaders in their schools to facilitate this change. Additionally, the role of school and subject-matter supervisors needs to change from that of inspector to that of a facilitator of teacher learning and growth.
Can you give some examples of model programs?
I am not aware of model programs that implement all of the above. At the teacher preparation program that we have at Birzeit University, we try to build a research-based program that focuses on developing student-teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge—that is, the knowledge associated with teaching specific topics within their discipline. This is an amalgam of subject-matter knowledge and pedagogy, among other things, and it is a product of both theoretical research-based knowledge and the wisdom of practice. However, the program is weak.
An example of a model teacher professional development (in-service) program is the Democracy Education: A Case-Based Approach to Teaching and Learning Democracy project, which I led a few years ago. In contrast to traditional programs that usually involve teachers attending a workshop for a few days and then “applying” what they have learned on their own, this was a three-year project. I worked with a small group of teachers (about twelve) over two years to understand the new trends in pedagogy and to design five cases that can be used at the middle or secondary school levels to learn about democracy. Teaching these cases to students involved employing a problem-solving approach, project-based learning, and collaborative small group work.
During the third year, most teachers taught these case-based units. We met on a weekly basis to plan for teaching the coming week and to reflect on the teaching of the past week. Finally, teachers wrote cases that documented their experience in using the new approach.
This model is expensive and time consuming, but it leads to a more permanent change in teaching practice. It also contributed to writing a book about the approach and the publication of three articles in peer-reviewed international journals. Not all professional development programs need to follow this example, but the model emphasizes the need for teachers to receive training that is subject-matter-based, allows them to receive support and feedback when trying to implement new ideas, and enables them to work collaboratively to research their practice.
Furthermore, the approach to improving curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and teacher training must be holistic. Piecemeal efforts can lead to disappointing results. When strong teacher training programs are inserted into a system with a traditional tawjihi assessment (a secondary-school matriculation examination), based on a battery of subject-material tests, for instance, student success will still be based on memorization.
For students to develop the skills of constructive citizenship, a paradigm shift is needed, placing these skills firmly at the center of education and as key constituents of an Arab graduate profile. This profile sets the framework for learning outcomes that serve as parameters to guide pedagogical interventions, while allowing for adaptation and customization of interventions to the sociocultural context.
The following general guidelines should serve as a springboard for more holistic educational reform across the Arab region:
- Each country should develop a teacher education strategy. This strategy should be facilitated by—but not be wholly a creature of—the Ministry of Education. It should involve official bodies, teachers, the broader society, and university-based faculties of education.
- To develop lifelong learners, teachers need to employ a metacognitive approach: students should be helped to understand how they learn, to define their learning goals, and to monitor their progress.
- The objectives of learning and the skills students acquire through the learning experience need to combine a set of necessarily related dimensions that should be pursued simultaneously: learning to think critically and solve problems; learning for individual empowerment; learning to be effective in the workplace; and learning about values and relating to others. Experimentation with creative pedagogies needs to be encouraged.
- To improve quality-related outcomes, students need to acquire a deeper understanding of school subjects. The knowledge should be couched in important disciplinary ideas, and it should be gained in a manner that facilitates retrieval and application. This requires studying a smaller number of topics in-depth rather than a larger number of customary topics in a shallow manner. Improving quality also requires teachers to cultivate creativity and innovation.
- Teachings need to address the preconceptions that students bring to classrooms and deal with the heterogeneity in students’ prior knowledge and abilities. In some cases, learning needs to be customized to motivate students and foster participation.
- The curriculum, especially in higher grades, should be less rigid. As students transition from pupils to citizens, they need to be given more freedom to explore their interests and develop practical skills. Rigid curricula, older pedagogies, and constant testing undermine such a transition.
- Vocational education requires greater attention and integration within the curriculum. Schools should foster, not smother, practical skills. And this should start from the early ages.
- Technology is often seen as a discrete subject or a set of techniques to teach; it is also sometimes seen as a panacea for handling educational problems. Instead, newer information and communications technologies should be seen as complementary to older ones and as an integral part of the educational process at all levels.
- Curriculum reforms should trigger changes in evaluations and assessments. Testing should serve education, not the other way around.
The State: Reinventing the Ministry of Education
At the center of educational systems in the Arab world stand ministries of education, hierarchical and sprawling institutions called upon to perform enormous missions. They stand alone, accountable to the top leadership. They need to be integrated into the entire society.
Ministries provide a critical service—just as critical as health and housing services—to the entire population. Even as their officials strive to cope with enormous challenges, ministries are often seen as authoritarian and insular structures. Given this conception of their role—and the enormous extent of the services they are called upon to provide—they can hardly be anything else. But the result can be stultifying, with key constituencies alienated and vested interests ensconced in official procedures and positions that block attempts at reform. (See the Egypt case study for an examination of controversies sparked by an ambitious reform-minded minister of education.)
Indeed, while the word “reform” is widely embraced, it can still sometimes seem threatening. Comprehensive reform of curriculum and pedagogy, for example, should not aim to undermine existing systems or structures but rather help students explore positive values, engage constructively with those who do not share them, and participate as active citizens in those structures that govern social and political life. As explored above, this must be done in a manner consistent with how students actually learn.
Even if this goal is unobjectionable in principle, embracing it can set off contentious debates. First, some pious members of the public suspect that students are being encouraged to question religious faith, with education sometimes becoming a battlefield between religious and secular forces. It should not be. When education gets dragged into such conflicts, the debate is actually more political than educational. After all, historically, religious education has always incorporated critical thinking and sought to teach students not just to recite truths but also to apply the core values and practices into their own lives. Pedagogy involving the critical study of texts, for instance, has been a standard educational technique in the religious field for over a millennium.
Second, adversarial relationships have sometimes developed between reformers and teachers (especially teacher unions), where the former see the latter as an obstacle and the latter perceive calls for reform as criticism or even as dissent and insubordination. For instance, in Jordan, several ministers have clashed over the years with the Jordanian Teachers’ Association. In Egypt, the teachers union has treated current reform efforts with some suspicion and has tangled with the current reform-minded minister (see the Egypt case study). Reform should instead be understood and pursued as an opportunity to form an educational vision, raise the prestige of the teaching profession, marry pedagogical theory to the practical experience of classroom teachers, and design a full set of professional development opportunities. In that sense, teachers—and any body representing them—must be integrated as partners in reform efforts.
Case Study
Egypt Case Study: The Politics of Educational Reform in Egypt
Egypt’s educational system has been built to serve the needs of a vast and growing population in a poor country. Like most other state services there, it is starved for resources and has developed in an environment in which quality must be sacrificed for quantity. But in recent years, a host of reform initiatives have come from the ministry that do not depend on generous funding. Tariq Shawqi, the current minister of education, had spoken forcefully and bluntly about the need for drastic changes.
One of his primary initial targets has been the system of examinations on which Egypt’s educational system rests. Periodic testing culminates in the general secondary school exam (thanawiyya ‘amma) that tests students on a battery of subjects. Their score determines not only whether they pass or fail, but also what subjects they may study in the state university system. The examination (and earlier tests, such as those at the end of sixth grade) have legions of critics who charge that they are based on rote memorization, place enormous and inappropriate pressure on young students, and encourage students entering university to study the subjects they score high on, rather than those that match their interests and broad abilities. The minister has suggested stepping away from a memorization-based examination, which he holds responsible for distorting pedagogy and rewarding the wrong skills.
The stress on examinations has generated confusion and corruption as well. Fake and even real exams are circulated in advance. Teachers hire themselves out to give private lessons, for a fee, where they coach students for the test. This shifts education outside of state-supported classrooms into a hazy and ill-regulated market where families feel compelled to spend money to guarantee their children’s success.
Besides targeting the examination system, the minister has also focused policies on integrating more technology into teaching methods. Ironically, this need is felt even in the subject of computer technology, where students are currently taught how to use a computer using printed textbooks and are unable to implement the lessons learned on the actual devices themselves. The transition to online textbooks is also perceived as a necessity to encourage investment in private and public access to the internet in remote areas.
An end to corruption and better testing and modernized instruction would seem at first glance to be uncontroversial. But the minister has sparked a series of controversies. Some leaders of the teachers union have complained that the press for reform is based on a lack of appreciation for those currently working and interpreted the minister as treating teachers disrespectfully as the problem. Parents have eyed the reform process anxiously, since there is such enormous pressure on students to perform; any shift in the system can cause confusion. Access to online resources is hardly universal in Egypt, and some worry that schools serving rural areas or poorer students will fall victim to a digital divide.
Some reforms cross some material interests; for example, textbook printing is a major industry. Those who look at the possibility of significant savings are balanced by those who fear pulling the rug out from under state-supported printers. Public criticism of the minister’s plans have been voiced by teachers, parents, and politicians in the press and on social media and in parliament. The deputy chairman of the parliament’s Committee for Education and Scientific Research, Hani Abaza, has stated that in the short run, schools cannot function without textbooks—illustrating that if the general idea of reform is popular, each particular initiative risks a counterreaction.
Perhaps the main lesson of the Egyptian experience is that reform efforts must be pursued politically and not simply viewed as technical improvements to be imposed. A number of stakeholders must be coaxed along. Teachers, publishers, parents, and students are all deeply invested in the educational system and watch any changes very closely.
Managing these pressures and demands requires a transformational shift. Ministries should reinvent themselves by moving away from being service providers toward being vision/standards setters and process facilitators, while maintaining their role as regulators. Specific reform efforts in recent years are worthy of broader regional study. (See the Egypt case study for a description of a ministry-led effort in Egypt, the Alzaghibi interview for the Saudi experience with a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches, and the Craissati interview for a description of a society-wide reform process in post-uprising Tunisia.) International networks are being constructed to support and link various initiatives (for example, the Life Skills and Citizenship Education Initiative, which involves international organizations and nongovernmental organizations but influences some Arab ministries).
Instead of simply imposing curricula, writing textbooks, and testing students, ministries can lead societal dialogues about what kind of graduates schools should produce: What is the profile (or set of profiles) that the educational system is designed to foster? (See the Craissati interview for some steps taken in this direction through society-wide dialogue in Tunisia.) Answers to this question—and not a collection of textbooks—are the heart of a true curriculum.
Interview
Reforming Saudi Education
Mohammed Alzaghibi is the chief executive officer of Tatweer Company for Educational Services (T4edu), based in Riyadh.
How is education reform pursued in Saudi Arabia?
The Ministry of Education (MOE) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has implemented innovative initiatives on both a small and a large scale. Whether reform initiatives are proposed centrally or at a local level, challenges are encountered—particularly related to defining innovation, identifying priorities, and assessing impact. When a reform is approved in the pilot phase, there are further challenges as it is scaled up to a roll-out phase.
What kind of reform is possible from the top?
Personal high-level support, along with being seen to meet the needs of the ministry’s overall strategy, can have an influence on the success and life-cycle of an initiative. This can result in some initiatives being quite short-lived. Centralized interventions tend to receive ongoing support, as long as personal sponsors and supporters remain constant in their official positions on issues.
Having said this, the decision to continually finance approved and supported initiatives rests with government bodies outside of the MOE. These bodies usually prefer visible and concrete projects that are easy to monitor and ensure completion. Long-term and difficult-to-measure initiatives struggle to sustain their funding.
Given the centralized running of 30,000 schools in the KSA, it is hard to ensure and monitor the fidelity of implementation.
What about reform from below?
Districts and schools vary in maintaining the rationale and essence of top-down interventions. This may lead to superficial implementation as well as duplication with other similar initiatives at the district level. Moreover, if the school has an ambitious, active principal, the school may become what some educational reformers call the “Christmas tree school”—where many incoherent and temporary initiatives are implemented in what could be described as a cosmetic approach. Such initiatives rarely meet the needs of the MOE strategy, and the amount of time allocated for their execution does not result in genuine implementation.
Strict centralization, combined with temporary and partial commitment, has perhaps led districts and schools to lose faith in genuine, committed, and supported reform. There has also been a boom in the opening of private schools due to their relative autonomy and some parents’ financial ability to enroll their children. Universities admit more students from private schools than public schools. Private schools maintain a focus on providing a safe environment and ensuring academic achievement. These visible measures have contributed to the popularity of private schools and have encouraged the MOE to adopt a charter school model that assumes a direct correlation between quality and autonomy, risking the abandonment of the public sector.
Currently, the country is moving toward a reform vision that attempts to marry top-down and bottom-up initiatives.
Part of the reforms involve moving assessment out of the ministry. Can you tell us about that experiment?
The ministry is trying to put assessment in the hands of teachers to ensure that changes do happen at the classroom level. The aim is for teachers to do continuous formative assessments that accord with students’ various learning starting points. Recently, as part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, the MOE initiated a competency-based education approach that relies on teachers’ efforts to understand students’ individual learning progression alongside typical collective assessments.
In conjunction with this move away from the MOE conducting summative assessments, an external body that reports to the king has been established to conduct overall evaluations of the educational system. Although in its early stages, the body is seen as providing a more credible independent evaluation, as well as enabling the MOE to focus on improving learning, teaching, and leadership.
You are involved in a private company that is partnering with the educational sector. What is the idea behind it?
For decades, the MOE has been responsible for providing all services linked to education—whether it be building schools, providing transportation, developing and implementing technology infrastructure, developing and revising textbooks, and so on. And all these services have been centrally and internally budgeted, managed, implemented, and monitored. With a large number of schools (approximately 30,000), you struggle to do all of this along with other duties like planning, policymaking, and quality control. Education is a consuming and challenging daily business that can bury you and perhaps inhibit you from reflecting on your progress or trying out new initiatives. To overcome this, some of these services—like construction, transportation, technology infrastructure and learning systems, and textbook development—have been transferred to newly established government-owned companies linked to one holding company chaired by the education minister. Key stakeholders are also represented on the company’s board. The MOE sets the direction for all the companies, monitors quality, and approves deliverables. It is still a learning curve for all, but with less bureaucratic administration involved, service delivery appears to be faster. In terms of quality, more time is needed for the envisaged improvements to be judged and measured.
Interview
A Tunisian Model?
Dina Craissati is an author and senior adviser on education and development; she has provided technical expertise to diverse nongovernmental organizations and institutions, including the United Nations Children's Fund and the International Development Research Center.
Tunisia’s revolution was seen as an uprising led by excluded youth. How has the postrevolutionary society handled education?
The decades following Tunisia’s independence in 1956 and the formulation of the education reform law of 1958 saw substantial investments and strides in the education sector, including the attainment of universal primary education, the development of a new modern curriculum focusing on citizenship, the reduction of inequities, and the promotion of human resources. However, the 2011 Tunisian Revolution highlighted major shortcomings, which are also characteristic of other Arab countries’ educational systems: high school dropout rates, especially among the poor; deteriorating quality of education; weak competency acquisition, rising unemployment, and alarming radicalization among youth; feeble teacher training systems; and excessive centralization and ineffective governance.
At the onset of the 2011 revolution, the transitional government quickly prioritized the reform of the educational system and underlined the importance of two approaches: the reform process had to be participatory (to include all stakeholders) and it had to be strategic (to address the fundamental challenges related to equity, quality, and governance).
Was the reform process implemented as envisaged?
In March 2012, a large conference was held on the methodology of the education reform and was followed by consultations—from the central to local level—with teachers, counselors, school directors, inspectors, administrators, students and parents, unions, political parties, employers, and civil society organizations.1 Technical committees analyzed and summarized the content of these consultations, and the summary then became the subject of a broad national dialogue launched in January 2015 following the legislative and presidential elections, which marked the transition phase of the revolution. The dialogue lasted eight months and was led by the Ministry of Education, the Tunisian General Labor Union, and the Arab Institute for Human Rights (representing civil society). It also brought several concerned ministries together. The results were compiled in a national report, which, in turn, guided the development of an education white paper and the Strategic Plan for the Education Sector 2016–2020.
The education five-year plan constitutes a comprehensive reform package that aims, among other things, to universalize pre-primary education, improve teacher training and quality education, enhance vocational education to align with labor market needs, and strengthen governance and program implementation and evaluation. A technical commission was established within the Ministry of Education to lead major curriculum reform. Here, too, the process was exemplary because of two major aspects. First, it included the active contribution of teachers, inspectors, and other relevant stakeholders and experts, and it was accompanied by capacity development workshops on curriculum design and pedagogical approaches. Second, it ensured the mainstreaming of life skills and citizenship education into curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular learning channels, enabling linkages between the three. It also underlined the importance of life skills acquisition across the various learning cycles starting from the early ages up to post-basic education, encouraging the adoption of interdisciplinary approaches, the applicability of life skills to all fields of knowledge, and the alignment of assessment methods. Most important, it featured life skills acquisition as not only key for improving learning achievements but also for enhancing employability and promoting citizenship, human rights, empowerment, equity, and inclusion.
What can other societies learn from this experience?
While the educational system and curriculum reforms are still in progress, key lessons can be drawn from the Tunisian experience. First, while education reform needs to be based on sound evidence, technical knowledge, expertise, and the attainment of results, the active participation of all relevant stakeholders in defining the essence and objectives of the reform is key to ensure buy-in and consensus; social, political, and financial support; and sustainability. Second, the involvement of teachers, specifically in the curriculum reform, is essential to enable them to implement the necessary changes that need to occur in the classroom and in the school. Third, interministerial collaboration in the education reform ensures that the education sector is in sync with and enhanced by the socioeconomic sectors, such as youth, labor, and social affairs. And finally, for education to fulfill its mission, it needs to be based on human rights and citizenship values just as much as the acquisition of knowledge and the preparation of students for work and life.
Notes
1 Conférence nationale sur la ‘Méthodologie pour la réforme du système éducatif,’ Tunis, March 2012.
This approach will change the operating model: rather than having the ministry position itself as a fortress of expertise and management, it would serve as the leader of a socially engaged process. Freed from the current emphasis on monitoring fidelity to specific curricular material, ministries can instead focus on setting general policies and articulating a vision, setting general standards, and facilitating their monitoring and implementation. The point is not to undermine ministries of education but to anchor them more fully within the state and the society so that education becomes the concern of all and ministries are integrated rather than insulated.
Even as ministries shift from simply delivering material to broadly facilitating curricula design, they must set standards (and regulate these). But this should be done as part of a process of societal dialogue.
This will require two major restructuring efforts:
A rethink and redesign of the ministries’ role within the state. Ministries that are leaders rather than bastions of authority and providers of services would function differently within the state apparatus. Specifically, they would
- Provide support to those responsible for implementing innovative interventions. Instead of merely holding schools and teachers accountable, ministries could identify their emerging professional development needs. Rather than being an “inspection” that emphasizes deficits, evaluation and assessment could become the engine for inquiry, problem solving, and sustainable growth and innovativeness.
- Reposition research and evaluation so that it would no longer solely be a ministry function but instead entrusted to specialists in independent commissions (for example, as has been attempted in Saudi Arabia [see the Alzaghibi interview]). Such a process can lead to identifying a series of benchmarks and performance indicators. Qualitative and quantitative assessment of these is not merely a technical task for ministries. While ministries set the vision and standards in consultation with various stakeholders, independent bodies should conduct part of the qualitative and quantitative assessments and report to senior political authorities and the general public about the state of education. This will allow authorities and the general public to hold ministries accountable to the standards they have set with society’s input.
- Build strong links with other state entities so ministries of education are not controlling the educational system in a silo. Ministries of youth have networks of organizations (such as youth clubs) outside of the formal educational system that can help inform policy; ministries of social affairs can link schools to other governmental and communal structures; ministries of labor and economy can link schools to employers; and ministries of higher education and state universities oversee much teacher education and are vital partners in any reform efforts.
The building of mechanisms for broader partnerships and community engagement. Past reform efforts have generally been pushed hard from the top—the effect has been to centralize more in an effort to force educational reform. And top officials often turn over quickly, leading to ephemeral reform. For instance, Jordan has had a regular succession of ministers—some with very bold visions, who did not stay in the ministry long enough to pursue any long-term agenda.
Another option has been not to reform the state system but to build large private alternatives (most ambitiously in Qatar).
Both approaches have brought mixed results at best. Local innovation and broad social engagement need some national and state involvement to counteract the risk that education will deepen rather than ameliorate inequalities. Disparities are currently increasing in some societies to the extent that a bifurcation is at risk of emerging: elite (often private) education for the few and an underfunded state sector for less fortunate nonelites.
A hybrid approach—one that maintains the state role in education but builds mechanisms for broader societal partnerships and engagement at all levels—will be most effective.
- Schools can build cooperative education and vocational training with local organizations and enterprises; they can involve parent bodies and community groups; and they can pursue active pedagogies that move some school activities directly into the community (linking school projects with community organizations, local businesses, or municipal governments) so that education becomes more visible outside as well as inside school walls. And schools can draw on expertise within their own communities—currently, students are rarely asked to find, assess, and learn from experts.
- At the national level, the private sector and civil society should be brought into dialogues about educational needs and vision, focusing on the curriculum very broadly defined (to include not only the material students must master but also what kind of adult citizens the society wishes to foster).
The Society: Reform Through Engagement
Perhaps the biggest unacknowledged challenge for educational reform is that schools are asked to do so much in a world in which much of the learning happens before, after, and outside of school—in the home and the broader society. Or rather, what takes place within the classroom is deeply influenced by the overall social context in which schools operate. Educational reform cannot simply be a task given to existing schools as if they are isolated places but must instead be based on rethinking the role of teachers and schools as part of a broader social fabric of education.
Acknowledging this reality will help societies redefine what they ask schools and teachers to do and assist them rather than asking them to do it alone. Arab schools cannot—and should not—be separated from family and community but instead should actively engage them so that the various influences on student learning (formal and informal) are complementary.
Actually, the challenges posed by the impact of social context are acknowledged by those who encounter them daily. They are widely known at the grassroots level; most people directly engaged in teaching students struggle constantly with the realities imposed by various economic, social, and family problems. But the challenges are rarely acknowledged at a policy level because educational systems tend to guard their expertise and autonomy, effectively treating the classroom as an island where teachers do their educational work. And societies—from parents to senior decisionmakers—reinforce the boundary between school and life by implicitly placing the entire education burden on teachers and schools.
When societies take a utilitarian view of education—when parents look to schools solely as places that should leave their children with the ability to earn high salaries, obtain useful technical skills, and find rewarding careers and when senior officials think only in terms of producing graduates with marketable resumes—most students, parents, and officials are inevitably disappointed.
When education is instead anchored in a vision to prepare youth to be engaged citizens and committed members to the betterment of their local society and the improvement of the global human condition—and when everyone from parents to senior officials shares this vision—they can support a set of reforms that will convert the educational apparatus from one that is asked to school children to one that turns them into learners.
And it will encourage a far more holistic sense of what schools should be focusing on. With an emphasis solely on science education, marketable skills, and testing, pedagogy and curriculum are distorted to serve utilitarian ends. Science is taught not as a process but instead as a set of truths or techniques to be mastered. Humanities and social sciences—where the most critical citizenship skills are directly addressed—can fall by the wayside.
The specific reforms that this shift from schooling to learning engenders will likely vary from society to society. But it is possible to advance some suggestions that should find traction throughout the region:
- Encourage and enable teachers to interact with communities—to bring students out of the classroom into community institutions and bring community institutions into the classrooms.
- Encourage officials to consult widely on reforms—to view societies as partners rather than obstacles to overcome in the pursuit of positive change.
- Encourage a holistic view of the entire curriculum (social sciences and humanities, as well as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) by involving communities in setting general goals and standards about the kinds of graduates schools should produce rather than focusing on the cultivation of specific skills needed for today’s workplace. (See the al-Khadra interview for an argument for the necessity of social science and humanities education.)
- Integrate newer technologies into the classroom and orient teachers toward blended education, treating such innovations not as alternatives or supplements but as bridges to connect classroom learning to the broader world. Newer technologies can support faster communication, offer new testing tools, reduce printing needs, enable self-assessment and more flexibility, and provide greater access to data and information. Technology use should complement not replace traditional classroom approaches that integrate social, emotional, and artistic components. Team building, working as a group, solving problems using collective intelligence, thinking outside of set processes and protocols, and many other social aspects of learning still must take place in the classroom. (See the Hourani interview for an exploration of the ways technology can be integrated.)
- Address issues of equity and access—but only after surveying what the real problems are. The obstacles are often different from what is assumed. For instance, access to the internet through desktops and laptops varies considerably by region and income level, but access through cell phones has actually been very widespread for some time, even in some rural communities. Integration of technology must thus run simply to stay in place—and this requires not only staying abreast of the technologies themselves but also paying attention to (rather than assuming) what students actually do and do not have available. Access to high-quality education in remote and rural areas is more often impeded by a lack of strong teachers who are willing to live in such areas than by limited access to technology. Greater use of e-classrooms may be one way (though of course not the only way) to address this disparity.
Building a New Education Vision
Arab societies collectively are failing to prepare coming generations for the challenges they will face. This is clearly the case in the economic realm, where distress has been growing about youth unemployment, lags in productivity, and stagnation rather than social mobility for graduates. But this is only part of the problem. It is not simply that educational systems are not producing the expected number of skilled workers, but they are not producing good learners or good citizens.
Interview
Humanities and Social Sciences in Jordan
Wafa al-Khadra is an associate professor of English and American literature at the American University of Madaba in Jordan.
How are the humanities and social sciences treated in Jordan?
They simply are not given the importance they deserve. The problem is, essentially, threefold. The first, and most salient, dimension of the problem has to do with the system’s bias toward the sciences and prejudice against the humanities. By the time a student gets to secondary school, students with higher grades (especially in scientific subjects) are channeled to the “scientific” stream; others go to the “literary” (in other words, humanities) stream. Students, parents, and the broader society are told, in effect, that the literary stream is less important or prestigious.
Second, those students in the scientific stream are given fewer courses in humanities and social sciences, again delivering the message that they are less important and science is more serious.
Third, several subjects in the humanities and social sciences are totally absent from the school syllabus. Subjects like philosophy, world history, and literary criticism were dropped in the late 1970s due to internal politics within the Ministry of Education. Subjects like music and art are almost entirely absent now.
Officials have been reiterating the fallacious notion that the country’s development depends on the scientific disciplines—that the needs of the labor market are better met by scientific subjects. They say, “What do we need history, philosophy, and Arabic literature for?”
Is this distinction between humanities and the sciences accurate?
No. It ignores what the humanities and social sciences can do for students that other subjects cannot do—at least to the same degree or in the same ways. Essential life skills—such as critical thinking, critical analysis, free association, and communication—are overlooked based on the perceived needs of the workplace.
But stating this even represents a misunderstanding of the workplace. Several studies show that many chief executive officers internationally, including of scientific companies, are graduates of the humanities, where they have focused on the arts of communication, human interaction, and social and life skills. Many of the so-called twenty-first century skills (for the labor market and otherwise) are best served by a humanities syllabus.
And a humanities syllabus endows students with many other attributes and skills, including open-mindedness, flexibility of thinking, broad-mindedness, and innovativeness. In addition, the humanities play an important role in enabling students to empathize with others and deal with them in humane ways.
For these reasons and others, there is a need to reverse this culture of prejudice against the humanities and social sciences at Jordanian schools and to give them the attention they deserve.
Interview
Technology and Education Reform
Sami Hourani is the director of Leaders of Tomorrow and the founder and chief executive officer of Forsa for Education, based in Amman.
How can newer information and communication technologies be harnessed by educational systems in the Arab world?
When I talk about information and communication technologies (ICT) and their connection with the educational system, I refer to my experience with For9a (Forsa, فرصة), an online platform for educational resources. When drafting a youth strategy to support the project, I looked at the extent to which technology and the internet are infiltrating rural areas. I discovered that penetration is not an issue. During youth consultations, I asked the participants to raise their hands if they have a smartphone. And everyone put their hand up. Syria, Yemen, Egypt, and Morocco—hardly the wealthiest places in the region—are some of the countries with the highest number of visits to the website (For9a).
The internet is already present in the classroom. We used to think of this as a question of equity, and it is when you are talking about tablets, desktops, and laptops. But if you look at phones, things have changed even within the past few years. The internet can be a way of reaching outlying areas; it need not exclude them. About 70 to 80 percent of For9a visitors used to access the website from desktops and PCs. Now, it’s the opposite; 70 to 80 percent are accessing it from smartphones, followed by desktops and PCs (20 percent) and tablets (10 percent). Especially for informal purposes, we need to invest in smartphones in order to reach the population.
Some educators were worried that any kind of emphasis on ICT would distract from the traditional classroom environment, and it is often seen as an alternative. But others were much more enthusiastic about it, believing that these technologies could be integrated with, rather than replace, traditional education approaches.
Are such technologies seen as providing an alternative to a traditional classroom environment? Or are they an appropriate part of such an environment?
I am often shocked when youth between twelve and eighteen years old tell me that they are challenging their teachers in the classroom about using and integrating technologies. The youth say that they use Google often to research topics provided to them by their teachers. This is a new and emerging phenomenon.
So the technologies are there. They are in the classroom. This introduces as a new stress for teachers, and it can be frustrating for them. Some teachers may not want to go the extra mile to integrate technology, provide better access to information, and ease teacher-student relations.
One of the reasons that teachers might be uncomfortable with the integration of technology is that students may get ahead of them and somewhat drive the situation. So, how do we equip teachers in this new environment?
To solve the problem fully, my honest and realistic answer is to wait for a new generation of teachers to emerge and to start investing in them. So, instead of equipping the current 80,000 teachers in Jordan,1 you start with the newcomers. For example, for every new teacher you hired after 2015, you start integrating technology into their teaching methods.
At least in Jordan, the percentage of young teachers is quite high—at 40 percent.2 These teachers are probably going to be receptive to these new technologies and training.
But we have a broader issue we need to address. Right now, I believe we are lacking a vision for what we are expecting from and for students. This also affects the way we evaluate courses. We cannot have the question of technology divert us from the question of what the vision and purpose of education are. To simply include technology, or automate the teaching process, is not enough or beneficial. The whole evolution of the processes in terms of integrating technology is not just about making things happen online.
Technology is revolutionizing education when it comes to expected educational outcomes and evaluation. It is challenging the human brain to get to another level of problem solving, analysis, and art and social skills. Decisionmaking around educational outcomes and evaluation measures should take that into consideration.
I think reform must be about changing the curricula and also integrating technology in a way that leads to new education outcomes—that is crucial.
Notes
1 Wizarat al-Tarbiyya wa-l-Ta`lim, Al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya Al-Hashimiyya, [The Ministry of Education of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan] “Taqrir al-Ihsa’i li-l-`Am al-Dirasi 2016/2017 [Statistical Report for the 2016/2017 Academic Year], http://www.moe.gov.jo/sites/default/files/ltqryr_lhsyy2016-2017_1.pdf.
2 Nadim Zaqqa, Economic Development and Export of Human Capital. A Contradiction? The Impact of Human Capital Migration on the Economy of Sending Countries; A Case Study of Jordan (Kassel, Germany: Kassel University Press, 2006).
To that end, educational systems need to be redesigned—or rather converted from schooling to learning systems. Instead of focusing on the inculcation of material and skills defined by today’s workplace, learning systems need to base teaching approaches on how students actually learn and what skills are needed for lifelong learners in an evolving world. Ministries of education need to reinvent themselves—transforming from controlling, authoritative, and isolated structures to vision setters that are anchored in the broader society and integrated with other state bodies. And rather than operating as separate institutions, schools need to become part of a learning network with close links to local, national, and even international communities.
It is not fair to hold educational systems fully to blame for all social problems. But neither can the host of social and political problems in the region be used as an excuse for failing to address the poor quality of education. Much progress can be made even in the context of fiscal constraints and weaknesses in governance. Indeed, educational systems might help in producing a generation that can better deal with those difficulties. Rising generations can be transformed from a looming threat in the eyes of their rulers to agents of a better future.
Notes
1 United Nations Development Program, Arab Human Development Report 2016: Youth and the Prospects for Human Development in a Changing Reality (New York: UNDP, 2016), 31, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/2699/ahdr2016en.pdf.
2 See World Bank, “World Development Indicators: Literacy Rate, Youth Total (% of people ages 15–24) and Gender Parity Index,” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.1524.LT.ZS?locations=1A and https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.1524.LT.FM.ZS?locations=1A.
3 See World Bank, “World Development Indicators: School Enrollment, Tertiary (% gross),” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.TER.ENRR.FE?locations=1A.
4 See World Bank, “World Development Indicators: Education Inputs,” http://wdi.worldbank.org/table/2.7.
5 The analysis and policy recommendations in this paper are largely drawn from a workshop and private correspondence with the expert authors.
6 Muhammad Faour, “A Review of Citizenship Education in Arab Nations,” Carnegie Middle East Center, May 2013, https://carnegieendowment.org/files/education_for_citizenship.pdf.
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