(I tried emailing them on their contact info from the website but in vain. But its an open letter so...)Dear Dr. Majid Bin Ali Al Nuaimi, Minister of Education,
My name is Isa and I am a Bahraini citizen. I am 23 years old and I am, by society's standards, a failure. Rather than having graduated with a degree by now and off to initiating a career and maybe taking the first few steps at starting a family, I am here at home doing my A-levels all over again even though I had already done so and passed (the private section’s stamp of your respective Ministry confirms this).
Why am I complaining to your excellency? I believe I have a message to reiterate to all the responsible people and this is that attempt. I’m going to illustrate how failures like me, and there are quite a-many, can trace back their failure to the job of your respective Ministry and your-excellent-self, how inadequately that job is being handled and the following lack of organic progress in our society.
Why am I doing my A-levels again if I have it? The answer to this will probably confuse you.
Because, I want to get educated.
I was lucky to have graduated from a private school which has given me the privilege of this language and as a result, my ability to read all those very insightful literature that are available. Independent of my school’s curriculum of course.
My parents could not afford the best schools but they did what they could to enter my siblings and me into an Indian curriculum school. I honestly can not remember one single piece of useful information from there.
Apart from English, nothing.
I chose to communicate with you by this language today so that you can understand the depth of my knowledge and win me some credibility to my claims.
That was remarkably to the point of the root cause of our problem. We do not know how to harness the science and technology in our world. And the reason is fairly straight-forward too; we are not provided with the tools to harness because most the institutions that are authorized to control this are not qualified for the task.
The one question that is running through me over and over is: Has your excellency actually entered the schools and institutions that your respective Ministry grants license to run? Pardon my audacity but I am genuinely dumbfounded at the complete lack of interest to take great care in establishing affordable good schools and educational institutions.
It’s one thing to want to,” gain the optimum benefit from the diverse educational resources available worldwide” and completely another to indiscriminately authorize people to start their own educational institutions without a clear and international guideline for quality.
I am not going to touch on the government schools because I was never a part of them and can not speak on behalf of others. However, they have quite a negative reputation in our country and where mostly the uneducated and the poor register their children with great dismay at the unavailability of a better, more affordable option.
But I believe, be it government or private, most of our educational institutions severely lack up-to-date regulation.
School, to me, was very superficial because the subjects, and the teachers preaching those subjects, could not provide us with the arc that connects their sermon to the real world. School felt more like an obligatory ritual lacking authenticity rather than an educational incubator that provided knowledge.
I didn’t know, or wasn’t aware of this problem, until years later when doubt compelled me to rely on myself in understanding this world.
Most people like to be good at what they do and in the so-called real world this need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it, because they're given a fake thing to do. When I was in high school, I let myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what I did and be satisfied by merely doing well in school.
Adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself. And that is why they harness, because they have a motivation and a goal to satisfy.
When I ask people what they regret most about school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. Some people say this is inevitable-- that students aren't capable of getting anything done yet since they have no clue what they want to do with their lives.
I didn't know what I wanted to be after school and with my life although people always asked me this, supposing I had an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get me talking.
Certainly no one asked about my plans, and there was no priority placed on teaching the options available at school. We were only rushed to choose our life's work in college and no class, course or seminar was dedicated to make us aware that what we needed to do was discover what we wanted to specialize in and as it turns out, it's hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs.
And there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work done in the last four years didn't exist when I was in school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.
And yet every day, students all over the country fire up with no idea on the target and the outcome is a generation bound by some plan made early on at an uneducated and premature stage of their lives. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster.
How I wish someone had told me certain imperative things in school and saved my time, money and energy. And I believe these are so basic and elementary that its a shame we do not have the appropriate regulations to tackle them.
I left school and decided to pursue my high school degree from a locally reputed institute and did my A-levels in Business, Accounts and Economics. I happened to be lucky in doing my A-levels with the Cambridge board as they had a standard that they were expected to meet internationally and so, I benefited immensely from my A-levels experience.
And then, cluelessly, continued in the Business major at University also.
I learned that it's dangerous to design your life around getting into Universities in Bahrain, because the people you have to impress are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, according to my own personal experience and the accounts of many of my friends, if the student charms the professors, they get a pass with minimum effort.
I also learned that a key ingredient in many subjects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. I learned not to assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest and that I have to search actively for the tiny number of good books.
I spent the next two years of my life learning absolutely nothing again. And I could not take this. I argued with my parents daily, trying to explain how useless my University was, and almost every other University in Bahrain, but they typically retort with the clichéd response of how the undergraduate degree will dictate my future.
Before credentials, job positions were obtained mainly by influence and connections, if not outright bribery. It was a great step forward to judge people by their performance on a test. But by no means a perfect solution. When people are judged that way, we tend to get cram schools—which they did in Ming China and nineteenth century England just as much as in present day Bahrain.
This doesn't work for an economy because even if its impressive for people to get hold of the easily attained credentials from the under-regulated institutions, the economy would soon feel the impact of performance not matching those credentials and isn’t this what we’re seeing here in Bahrain today? The lack of skilled labour?
So I decided the best thing for me to do was be honest with myself. If I wasn’t learning and just spending time and money fruitlessly, might as well do what I did when I gained real results. The A-levels. And this time in the sciences.
To society, I have failed and wasted time. I will let Allah be the judge.
Dear Minister, I don’t know if whether you will ever get to read this letter or if you do, respond and/or do something about the failure in our education system, but I do know this, I will be held accountable for what I do and my conscience cannot allow me to stay silent.
May Allah bestow His peace and happiness on all.
Sincerely,
Isa Sharif Sardar
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