In case we were not jolted by other reports in the past, the World Bank recently issued one of its own about the poor quality of education in the Arab world, in which it was claimed that the region is falling well behind others around the world.
Unless Arab countries make the improvement of their educational system a top priority, because education goes hand-in-hand with economic development and social progress, Arabs will continue to fail in meeting the challenges of modernity.
Another stark reminder, but is anyone listening out there? It goes without saying that a qualitatively responsive educational system, that among other things promotes independent thinking, is not only a key door-way to social mobility for the individual but is a necessary function of economic progress. Because of the sad state of Arab education, that this latest report by the World Bank attests to, social mobility for the average Arab citizen will be minimal and the economies of many of the Arab countries will stay stagnant, effectively as they have been since national independence. By the end of the 20th century, to dig up one statistic among others, the gross national product per capita of all Arab countries combined was slightly more than that of Spain, a country with only 15 per cent of the population of the Arab world.
In case there is doubt about the correlation between education and prosperity, consider this: Around the same time, roughly since the end of the Second World War, the countries that have made a successful transition from developing to developed status have all invested heavily, whether via government funding or the private sector, in educational opportunities for their citizens.
Barely literate teachers
South Korea, as one case in point, not unlike the other "Asian tigers", spends a comparatively disproportionate percentage of its national income on education. More recently, Ireland's economic boom was triggered, in part, by an expansion of primary and secondary schools, and increased funding for universities. A truism it may be, but economic progress, which in a trickle-down effect impacts systemically on a country's quality of life and its ability to engage creatively in the global dialogue of cultures, is rooted in societal investment in education. What we are experiencing in the Arab world today, a steep decline in our standard of living and quality of life, is directly attributable to our neglect of the importance of that role that education plays in our human communities.
True, countries like the UAE have created a $10 billion (Dh36.7 billion) foundation to establish research centres in Arab universities, but there are still elementary and secondary schools in Yemen, for example, with classes holding 100 students each, and others in Morocco with teachers who are themselves barely literate. (These two countries are named in the World Bank report as "the worst educational reformers".)
Writing in an op-ed in the Financial Times last October, James Wilsdon, director of the Atlas of Ideas Project at the think tank Demos, said: "Today, research and development spending across the 57 member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference averages just 0.38 per cent of the gross national product, compared with a global average of 2.36 per cent. This is not simply a sign of relative poverty: oil-producing states such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are among the lowest investors in research as a percentage of GDP. In 2005, the countries of the Arab world together produced 13,444 scientific publications, fewer than the 15,455 achieved by Harvard University alone".
And the Arab-based Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization, in a study carried out last January, found - hold on to your hat - that 30 per cent of the approximately 300 million people in the Arab world were illiterate. The figure jumps up dramatically for women, whose empowerment, as the 2005 Arab Human Development Report asserted "remains an essential axis of the Arab project for a human renaissance". Sadly, women's share in economic activity in our part of the world, though it has somewhat improved in recent years, is still the lowest in the world. Again, you know what to blame it on.
The shaping of Arab minds (with 60 per cent of of the region's population being under 30 years of age) should be much on Arabs' minds - or on the minds of those whose job it is to see to it that no child, as it were, is left behind, no student who evinces talent and potential is denied access to higher education. We need to do that not just to empower society by imbuing it with a literate, cultivated and productive populace, but to allow the dignity of learning for the sake of learning. That, last time I checked, was the heritage that we brought with us from our civilisational ethos between the 7th and 12th centuries.
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.
