Why have we fallen so low? Granted, the ministry of education is struggling with huge difficulties and operating under the pressure of conflicts of so many kinds - some finding their origins in national history, a few of a regional nature, and many of purely international and foreign dimensions. This cannot be denied. Settling any one of these conflicts alone will not mean, however, that all other problems will also be settled. In fact, unless a comprehensive and in-depth strategy to uproot the causes from where they originate, ramifications of the minor and/or surface problems addressed will tend to conceal priorities and give the impression that interventions are not appropriate while it is the causes that are not addressed. Perhaps, the apparent ailments of the educational system are but symptoms of more severe societal, political, cultural, ideological, economic, and strategic contradictions the pacification of which would need more than the intervention of one single ministry. For the independent observer, the recent attempts to re-stabilize the ship and to regain her capacity to fare well and safely in rough waters have been a good illustration of waste of energy, effort, resources, and time each of which as scarce and precious as the others. They also seemed to be an approach to address the most visible ramifications of far more deeply rooted problems and a case of taking the intervention on symptoms for hypothetical desired effects on both sea and ship. While the ministry can act on the various factors of its sector, it hardly has any leverage on the others in which most educational problems originate. Without a redistribution of authorities and competencies amongst the various governmental departments, the efforts of the ministry of education will remain vain. As long as the ministry of education is taken to be a technical department with no influence on decisions concerning poverty, the finances and the economy of the country, and on major cultural and ideological choices, its strategies will be limited to imagining ways of addressing symptoms and hoping that politics will provide adequate resources to implement them. Furthermore, deconstructing the educational system, as it is being done, without a vision of what to do with the pieces that make it and without a sound theoretical and consensual framework within which to reconstruct it is a jeopardy that should not be allowed to befall the country. The silence and hesitation of many teachers, researchers, and education specialists is a sign of the uncertainty that blurs horizons, darkens prospects and prohibits hope! At worst, it is indulging in a compromise that exposes the country to an irreversible peril. One of the severe deficiencies of the educational system is that it has never been able to express its true objectives in a coherent, clear and accurate manner. The expressions of quantifiable targets in terms of registration, gender equalization, socio-economic equal opportunity, geographic distribution, and rates of achievement have been tentative and never seemed to be convincing as they were neither tied to qualitative factors nor to the actual needs of the various national stakeholders and far from any correlation with required budgetary resources and observed outcomes. In fact, the little and very costly energy available seems to have always been mobilized to settle issues that are neither the origin of the real problems nor the major constraints that have been impeding a credible expression of objectives. The decision to triple the number of engineers trained while encouraging early retirement of professors, freezing recruitment and decreasing research budgets is a good example of the causes underlying the loss of credibility of education related decisions and the resignation of attempts of rational analysis. Likewise, the decision to decrease the number of hours dedicated to the teaching of a subject so as to increase the number of classes and students assigned to the same teacher is a good example of how quantitative concerns have affected qualitative standards. A language teacher who has more than two hundred fifty students every third of which at a different level cannot be expected to remember their names let alone to read and correct their homework. Anyone who has a different argument is invited to take up these classes and demonstrate how they can ensure and maintain the expected educational quality and performance and their own mental sanity in such situations. In the same manner, decreasing to three the former four years required to earn a BA has had dramatic consequences on the overall quality of the graduates and consequently on their later professional performances, their competitiveness on the job market and attractiveness to potential employees. Actually, the three years are but a theoretical expression of a few weeks every year. In fact, the two semesters of every year are reduced to irregular periods punctuated by weeks of recess for preparation for exams, weeks for exams and correction, weeks for make ups, and weeks for breaks. In several cases, weeks for strike and protest are to be added. According to many professors and students, the most they are actually in classrooms is six months a year. This gives an idea of both the quality and the performance of the graduates. What is intriguing, therefore, is on the one hand, how the graduates are criticized for their limited compliance with the profiles expected by the job market, and on the other hand, how nothing is done to correct the situation. In a prestigious engineering school, the English language course is a three year course of 25 hours a year spread over four months. Expecting such a course to be more than a maintenance intervention would be abusive and immoral. Not to decry such patterns would be to accept being an accomplice of the tragedy! Conflict is thus created from secondary offshoots and fundamental variance bred in non arguments. Opportunities to uproot the causes of dysfunctions that have become structural are thus missed. To worsen the situation, the high cost of non relevant and useless interventions conceals the intensification process of risk factors which end up overcasting priorities and thus jeopardizing the chances of a lasting resolution. Students are opposed to teachers and professors, teachers to their ministry and their supervisors, professors to their directors, deans and presidents, and society in general to the educational system. With the intervention of external forces and interests, internal contradictions become secondary and priorities become to nationalize the decision making process, to rehabilitate national expertise, and to re-situate education on top of all other urgencies. Zaki Abdellatif
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 10:34:24 +0000
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