Failure of education [Archives:2004/774/Letters to the Editor]

Najla A.
[email protected]
It perplexes me how our education systems fails to educate our people. The education system, systematically fails to open minds or to encourage creative and individual thinking. We are informed that to learn parrot fashion will give us success, but to question is to cause trouble, let a lone to think. Simple conformism is good and individualism is not. (I have to qualify this by supplementing that such a gross overstatement is not merely prevalent in the Yemeni education system, but more generally throughout the Arab, and the developing world.)
This then leads us to question the notion of parrot fashion, patriarchic learning, in which the teacher is always right. This reflects an endemic failure within greater society, whether it is from local institutions to the larger question of how we are lead. Reverence, maybe a question of manners, but not at the price of freedom to think which must be implemented holistically, from the individual unit to the ruling system. This lack of freedom reflects incompetence and stagnation and thus an intrinsic lack of progressive development, replaced by a flawed recursive change.
Lack of research, open society, open markets is one way forward. However much I wish for Arab regimes to embrace this, sadly our education system is only reflective of more of the same!
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