Saudi Arabia: What Saudi parents want

Fables are stories that teach timeless lessons. We all remember the story of the Hare and the Turtle and the valuable lesson it has taught us over time.

The story is about a Hare and a Turtle who decided to compete in a race. The Hare, fully aware of his natural agility and speed, laughed at the challenge and arrogantly took his time to reach the finish line. He played and grazed till he got exhausted and decided to take a nap. Meanwhile, the Turtle, fully aware of her sluggish nature and heavy shell, put all her energy to the task and with each painfully slow pace, she got closer to her goal - one step at a time. The Hare, after waking up from his brief nap could not bring himself to believe that he had lost a race which (in his own frame of mind) was his to win in the first place!

The moral of the story is universal. Those who plan... and are focused... and are determined to stay the course will achieve their objectives, while those who leave things to chance and are blinded by overconfidence will end up watching the world pass them by. Today, as the need for economic status and prominence is on the rise, many countries are burning the midnight oil to design creative systems for learning to produce a "world class" labor force that is competent in subjects such as the arts, the humanities, the sciences, and sports. Those who chose to ignore these realities will tragically wake up to find themselves left behind - just as the tragic hero of the fable, our friend the Hare, did.

It is a simple fact of Economics 101. Alongside land, buildings, and natural resources, the people of a nation are the most important engines of economic growth - and an internationally competitive school system is its only fuel. Many countries have succeeded in transforming themselves from being poor economies to becoming leading ones by simply re-engineering their educational systems. Ireland, China and Korea are but a few who can serve as "best practice" models to show how countries can make this dramatic shift. The moral of the story also hits home.

Saudi Arabia is no exception to this rule. The burning issue here at home is that first, we have a chronic state of unemployment; secondly, our school system is disconnected from the developments of the rest of the world; and thirdly, our general education policies are in direct opposition to those of our higher education ones. So long as we ignore these three facts, we will never be able to intervene in time to compete in the global race for national prominence and prosperity. Last Friday, in my weekly column "Building our Nation: Whose Responsibility"? I wrote about the tragic impact our education system has on our youth. I referred to an article that was recently published in Arab News, in which it was mentioned that more than 200 Saudi students on Saudi government-funded scholarships were deported from the US because of poor academic performance, delinquency and small crimes.

I asked the question that had these students received a "world-class Saudi schooling system" early on during their childhood years here at home, would we be reading about their shame today? I then explained that our system of education has a missing link between our two most important ministries: The Ministry of Higher education and that of the Ministry of General Education.

Whereas the former has a large budget allocated for our youths to travel to foreign countries on government-funded scholarships, the latter has not done the job of preparing them well for that day - but instead it has imposed a ban on the enrollment of Saudi children in foreign schools operating in the Kingdom legally. Except for those children who have special learning needs, and that includes those who are poor in Arabic.

I concluded that it is because of this inconsistency in educational policy between our two ministries that our youth, as well as our nation, are paying a heavy price today. For decades now, many financially able, law-abiding, patriotic Saudi parents are left with no choice but to bridge this educational gap by sending their children off to foreign countries in pursuit of an education system that will secure them a bright future on their return home.

This self-imposed exile is not new. It started some 40 years ago in the 1960s and 1970s when Saudi Arabia had just began its modernization process and schools back then were still a rarity. However today, in spite of the abundance of schools Kingdom-wide, this phenomenon still exists. One wonders why.

There is nothing more difficult than separating a child from her parents at an early age. Children who are separated from their families before their teenage years usually suffer significant emotional and social trauma that accompanies them well into their adult years. The feelings of homesickness, resentment, rejection, loss of identity as well as problems of adjusting to the host country, are but a few of the initial setbacks.

Later on, as these children turn into young adults and return home, other maladjustment issues such as culture shock, alienation, and a sense of lost "citizenship" take hold and further handicap their struggling efforts to blend back into the social fabric of their homeland. I speak out because I have been there, and done that. Once upon a time, I was one of those children who were sent away to a strange country speaking a strange language.

Some six years later I came back as one of those returning youths -somewhat culturally and intellectually alienated. I also ended up becoming one of those parents who made the difficult choice of parting from my children so that they could have the prospect of a bright future waiting for them on their return.

Do I regret any of it? No. But I do regret that Saudi parents today still suffer from not having the right to enroll their children in a "world class school system" of their choice here, in the comfort and security of our country - something that was denied to my children some 12 years ago as it was denied to me some 30 decades earlier.

Arab News, Author: Fatin Bundagji