Education is key to development [Archives:2007/1051/Opinion]

Abdulaziz Saleh Binhabtour
Celebrating the Teacher Day and honouring the outstanding teachers this year had a new color as teachers and education workers were granted entitlements and allowances. Thanks are due to the new wage strategy and approval of the hardship allowance.

Such strategies are due to be reflected on improving the living standards of teachers. In the meantime, awarding the outstanding teachers is due to encouraging male and female teachers nationwide to work hard and double their efforts.

These days, we get closer to two significant matters, the first of which is the annual review stage of the national primary education strategy which aims at evaluating this phase in coordination with donors as well as evaluating the range of success reached in light of the sought plans and programs.

The second matter is that of completing the secondary education development strategy. We are recollecting what has been achieved and confirming that we will take a new way in our missions, duties, and thoughts that helped us reach a consensus on a qualitative education to meet development demands.

Since the Ministry of Education decided to approve the educational system via a series of strategies and programs as part of the constructive updating, it has ever cared for implementing these strategies and programs.

If we want to reach our legal ambition toward providing a developed educational system to comply with Third Millennium Development Goals, we have to pay closer attention to education as the main pillar for human development, as well as the crucial strategic resource that meets the community needs through qualified outputs which are expected to be more able to deal with the labor market.

As a result of this role, the political leadership and the Yemeni government drew closer attention to education via allocating 21 percent of the general budget for education. This sector has become one of the top priorities for the political leadership represented by President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Through the strong will and determination, we at the Ministry of Education could create numerous education opportunities, whether in the regular education or the illiteracy eradication programs. In the area of illiteracy eradication and adult teaching, we could contribute to reducing the illiteracy rate to 45 percent and have plans to bring this rate down to 25 percent by the advent of 2015, thanks to the illiteracy eradication programs.

The ministry has plans to increase the number of children enrolled in the first grade of elementary schools up to 150,000 by the advent of 2009, as well as to offer in-kind and in-money incentives to boost the enrolment of kids in education and help those enrolled in schools gain knowledge and skills to make their community free of illiterate population.

Another plans set by the Ministry of Education include programs to upgrade and improve the quality of education, update school syllabuses, and improve the level of secondary school leavers, as the ministry believes that illiteracy constitutes a great barrier to economic, cultural, social, and political development.

In the public education, we found that the rate of enrolment in schools increases while the gap between male and female enrolment rates gets narrower, particularly after the concerned authorities offered education free of charge for girls from grade one to six and boys from grade one to three and exempted children in these grades from any tuition fees.

Developing education and improving its outputs tops the agenda of Saleh's platform, which gave a wider scope for education before it was applied in real-life situation. It coincided with the new cabinet's program under Ali Mujawar. We care for following the latest educational developments and the experiences of developed countries in the area of education, as well as the possibility of transferring the successful experiences of the developed countries to Yemen to benefit from them and search the best standards and measures to apply them in real-life situation.

The education sector requires additional efforts to reach the highest international levels in administration, design of syllabuses, or the construction of classrooms. We stress the necessity of improving students' learning throughout the different stages of education.

All the above-mentioned things can be achieved through training teachers in a way that transfers them from information recipients and data maintainers into creative and well-qualified staff. Around 86 thousand male and female teachers have been trained with an estimated average of one million and two hundred thousand training hours.

Currently, the Ministry of Education is planning to train as many as 120 thousand male and female teachers during the coming time period. From the ministry's viewpoint, training is pondered upon as the effective tool that gives the scientific meaning and the proper practical progress of schoolbooks that have undergone change and update. The schoolbooks were transferred from syllabi of instruction into analysis-based curricula.

As the world experiences scientific advancements and great changes because of the advancement in the area of education, training, and information technology, the Ministry of Education realized the importance of benefiting from such experiences.

We worked hard to integrate the computer as part of the school syllabus and supply schools with labs according to Saleh's platform, particularly as we are living in an age of information technology, and illiteracy in the developed world represents those having no access to computer, not those who can not read and write.

Abdulaziz Saleh Binhabtour is the Deputy Minister of Education and Chairman of the Higher Committee for Celebrating the Teacher Day.

Source: Al-Thawra Daily
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