The Politics of Education Reform in the Middle East

Self and Other in Textbooks and Curricula

Samira Alayan, Achim Rohde, Sarhan Dhouib, Samira Alayan, Achim Rohde, Sarhan Dhouib

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857454614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Education systems and textbooks in selected countries of the Middle East are increasingly the subject of debate. This volume presents and analyzes the major trends as well as the scope and the limits of education reform initiatives undertaken in recent years. In curricula and teaching materials, representations of the "Self" and the "Other" offer insights into the contemporary dynamics of identity politics. By building on a network of scholars working in various countries in the Middle East itself, this book aims to contribute to the evolution of a field of comparative education studies in this region.

1

EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN THE ARAB WORLD

Directives, Mechanisms and Challenges
in Lebanon, Syria and Oman

Nemer Mansur Frayha

Since the 1980s, educational reform has become a top priority at state and community levels all over the world, including the Arab countries. This chapter analyses the aims, scope and impact of educational reforms undertaken in three selected Arab countries: Lebanon, Syria and Oman. The study identifies a number of similarities and differences between the educational policies pursued in each of these countries. All of them have stuck to a centralised education system in terms of educational policy and administration. Educational reforms in these three cases were motivated by similar objectives, and all of them developed only short-term time frames for implementing reforms. While only minor variations are visible on the structural level, major differences between the three countries exist regarding school locations and resources as well as regarding specific educational policies.

This comparative and qualitative study aims to highlight the links between economic reforms and outcomes on the one hand and educational reforms on the other. It further aims to establish the mechanisms which enable these reforms. It will do so by examining the ways in which the three countries studied have employed such mechanisms and the actual measures of success of the reforms. The study is based on official documents and publications, existing research, personal experience and interviews conducted by the author with decision makers in Lebanon, Syria and Oman. A comparison of the components of the educational reform processes that began in these countries during the 1990s will inevitably reveal certain patterns in the educational reform effort at the state level. By examining some of the noticeable differences, the study will shed light on weaknesses and strengths in each of these systems.

The focus of this study is on the reform process in the general public education system at the pre-university stages. It attempts to answer the following questions: What are the motivations standing behind educational reforms in Lebanon, Syria and Oman? Which mechanisms for implementation have been adopted in each of these countries? What kinds of obstacles were faced on the way? To what degree did education reforms achieve their goals? What are the similarities and differences among these countries with regard to these questions and the components of their educational systems? Conclusions will be drawn from the data analysis and the information relating to all aspects of the educational reform process, its progress and its outputs in the three countries.

The study is based on personal experiences of the author, who was directly involved in review processes and educational reforms in the three countries mentioned. In the 1990s he served as director of the Educational Centre for Research and Development in Lebanon. He was later contracted by UNICEF to evaluate the comprehensive education and health education programs existing in Syria. Based on extensive field research and interviews with officials carried out as part of a general review of the curriculum, he then supervised training courses for the Syrian Ministry of Education’s Central Unit for Comprehensive Education. The author also spent four years in Oman, working as curriculum advisor in the Ministry of Education.

The Beginnings and Catalysts of Education Reform
in Arab Countries

While there is a long and rich history of education in the Arab region, education in its modern form is an institutionalised process that started over hundreds of years ago. Its evolution is tied to decision makers who see education as a vital factor in the development of any society, and one of the most important components of development, progress and growth. This study aims to examine specific developments in recent reform processes regarding pre-university public education, initiated after the Jomtien Conference held in Thailand in 1990 and the Dakar Conference held in Senegal in 2000. The study focuses on the directives and mechanisms of these reforms, and it attempts to evaluate to what extent these processes have been successful.

The Jomtien Conference was held in response to the UN World Declaration on Education for All in 1990, which aimed to demonstrate the role of education in development at individual, social and national levels, and it formed a launching point and catalyst for reform in many countries around the world. Regional and global conferences soon followed, all focusing on the necessity of reviewing education systems with an eye towards establishing gender equality in educational opportunities as one aspect of social justice, reducing the level of illiteracy, improving the standard of human resources for the sake of growth and development and attempting to combat poverty by means of education. The Dakar Conference, which took place ten years later, was convened to identify reform achievements and to establish a follow-up plan for expanding these reforms. According to the text adopted by the assembly, the Dakar Framework for Action, much less had been achieved during the previous decade than originally expected: There remained 113 million children deprived of elementary education, 880 million illiterate adults and continuing gender discrimination between male and female enrolment in school (Institute for International Cooperation 2000: 20). Among the most important results of this conference was that the governments of the participating countries committed themselves to implementing the goals of the agenda of Education for All for every citizen and every society. Thus each country became responsible for taking the initiative and realising these ambitious and necessary goals in its education system, such as working to enable all children to obtain free, high-quality, compulsory education by 2015, and reducing adult illiteracy by 50 per cent by the same date.

A number of educational conferences were held in the Arab World, some of them touched on what had first been agreed upon at Jomtien, and then subsequently at Dakar. The most important of these was the Cairo Conference, designed as a regional conference on the agenda of Education for All. It took place with the cooperation of the UNESCO regional office in Beirut in January 2000. All Arab nations took part in order to study and evaluate what had been achieved since the Jomtien conference and to prepare for participation in the Dakar conference to be held three months later.¹ The delegates considered that education was the key to sustainable human development and providing for the needs of basic education was among the top priorities. They also reaffirmed the vision of the Jomtien Conference. They conceded that early childhood care was still not receiving sufficient attention in the Arab World, that illiteracy was still widespread, that the access to and the quality of education was still limited, that the administration of the education system was often ineffective, and they vowed to overcome these difficulties (UNESCO, Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States 2002: 149–151).

This was at a general Arab level. Yet, what impact did the recommendations issued by the Cairo Conference have on educational policies of individual countries? To what extent were education reform processes initiated in the three countries sampled in this study triggered by the Jomtien and other such conferences? Since 1990, there were some notable developments in the educational sectors of Arab countries, but the majority were not so much a result of the Jomtien or Dakar conferences as a response to local and national needs for political reform and economic development. The following sections will elaborate on the specific motives behind education reforms carried out in Lebanon, Syria and Oman, and summarise their results.

Education Reforms in Lebanon

The formal starting point for the education reform process in Lebanon was the adoption by the members of Parliament of the Document of National Accord (the Taif Agreement) in 1989, which put to an end the civil war that had lasted for fifteen years. It included the following goals regarding the educational sector:

(1) providing access to education for all, and making it compulsory at least at the elementary level;

(2) securing the freedom of education in accordance with the law and general statutes;

(3) reforming the state run public, vocational and technical education sectors;

(4) reviewing the curricula and their development in order to reinforce the sense of national unity among citizens, to foster spiritual and cultural openness and to standardize textbooks on history and national education (Republic of Lebanon 1989: 14–15).

After the Taif Agreement and the election of the president of Lebanon’s ‘second republic’, the government adopted an economic plan to advance the country’s financial situation, which had almost collapsed in the course of the civil war. It was proposed that the economic plan should be in tune with a parallel educational plan. Thus, economic considerations hastened the implementation of what the Taif Agreement had stipulated regarding the process of education reform. The plan was completed in 1994 under the title ‘The Plan for Educational Revival’, and the following stand out among its objectives:

(1) strengthening the sense of national pride and unity among citizens, to foster spiritual and cultural openness, by reviewing the curriculum and its development;

(2) equipping the next generation with the necessary knowledge, experience and skills;

(3) achieving a balance between general academic education and vocational education, and cementing their relationship to higher education;

(4) appropriate implementation and integration of education with the needs of the Lebanese and Arab labor markets;

(5) keeping pace with scientific progress and technological development, and reinforcing interaction with global cultures (Republic of Lebanon 1994: 4).

As it appears from these aims, the primary concern was reinforcing national identity, which had become weak and faded during the war in which school and university students and graduates participated with fervour. Citizenship education was therefore one of the fundamental goals of the proposed reform process. Curriculum reform was considered a main vehicle for achieving these goals. In addition, the structure and outputs of the educational sector were reorganised, the educational ladder was set in order and the names of the educational stages and of the secondary school certificate were changed (Republic of Lebanon 1995). The development of new curricula was completed in 1997. Their implementation began in the 1997–1998 academic year and was completed within three years.

The mechanism for curriculum development and its implementation in Lebanon is extremely complicated, which generally speaking is just the opposite of how curricula should be. Indeed, changing the content of academic subject matter, or part of the subject matter, requires a study covering many stages and many educational and non-educational institutions (i.e. lobby groups) before being submitted to parliament which can eventually issue legislation on the matter. On average, the curricula are modified only once every thirty years, whereas educationalists generally agree that curriculum reform should be a continuous process.

The old curricula and teaching materials were issued between 1968 and 1971, and they have been widely criticised for being incongruent and devoid of any national direction; in short, they were lacking substance. After the beginning of the civil war in 1975, attempts by educators and even ministers of education (e.g. Boutrous Harb) at reforming the education system and reviewing the existing curricula were futile due to their lack of political support. The curriculum reform finally established in 1997 brought a modernisation of the content of academic subjects, introducing new subjects such as computer studies, technology, social studies, economics, a second foreign language and translation. It declared that teaching from now on should be focused on making the learner the center of the educational process and emphasised cooperative living and the Lebanese-Arab identity. However, due to a number of factors, implementing the new curriculum proved to be only partly successful. Thus, the curriculum contained inflated specific and overall objectives; the number of subjects was increased in an illogical and unjustifiable manner, particularly at the secondary stage (more than double the previous number); and no efforts were made in advance to introduce teacher-training schemes, in order to make sure teachers would not teach the content of the new curricula using traditional (teacher-centered) methods. Similarly, no suitable new evaluation system was put in place.

In an attempt to remedy these deficiencies in the structure of the curriculum and its means of implementation, in 1999 this author, at the time working as director of the Educational Centre for Research and Development, proposed a plan to develop the assessment system which would be appropriate to the curriculum goals and teaching strategies in order to fully integrate the components of the curriculum. The research was presented to the World Bank in an effort to obtain a loan that would make it a reality. Among the proposed projects was the establishment of a national training team, a project which was implemented in 2000 with World Bank funding. The training team was composed of prominent Lebanese educators who would be responsible for the ongoing teacher training. Similarly, modern educational projects were introduced that aimed to produce high quality in education that was tangible and not merely words, particularly given that the curricula put in place were curricula consisting of the same traditional academic subject material. A more comprehensive educational curriculum was put in place with material support from UNICEF for the first course in basic education. It was based on an educational/philosophical principle which stems from the fact that a child views issues and treats them as a single, comprehensive unit, and therefore the best and most successful educational approach is to teach her/him in a comprehensive way as well, and similarly to combine all of the information she/he is expected to learn into one book centered on the mother tongue, the Arabic language (Frayha 2003a). The Conflict Resolution project (1999), in which the Canadian Bureau for International Education participated, was aimed at the higher classes of basic education. Lebanese society had been experiencing successive internal conflicts; therefore this project was to enable the pupils as its future citizens to deal with problems and conflicts through non-violent means. The teacher would describe a conflict to the class for the pupils to discuss, and the two sides involved were given the opportunity to present their version of the background to the conflict or to respond (Frayha 2003b). This was one of the most successful educational projects which simulated the situation in Lebanon, but unfortunately it was brought to a halt by the Ministry of Education and the Educational Centre for Research and Development for reasons that seemed personal rather than professional.

Education Reform in Syria

Reform activities in Syria began in the 1990s, but became more accentuated after 2000. They consisted of amending the curriculum from the first to the twelfth grade of basic education, at an average of one grade every year, while more or less maintaining the same general objectives as in 1975, due to the inflexibility of the Syrian political system. Beginning in 1997, new subjects were introduced into the curriculum, such as foreign languages and information sciences. The curriculum overhaul began in 2001 and was completed in 2005, with a cautious review of the overall objectives – the same objectives which had been in place and undergoing modification since 1975. Reform did not take place all at once but rather in stages. The official education reform plan was in line with the Five Year Plans which the Syrian state had adopted long before, but in reality the Syrian government reacted in the face of a crisis of the educational system: Its review had shown that enrolment was outpacing output by a large margin, just as the rate of illiteracy had been increasing and the level of students’ academic achievement had been weakening at all stages. Officially, improving the quality of education and its output had always been among the main concerns of the government, but reality was quite different.

Since 1981 education has been compulsory in Syria from the ages of six to twelve. In 2001 this principle was extended to include all basic education through the age of sixteen. This stage now ends with official examinations to obtain the certificate of basic preparatory education. Students subsequently join the secondary or vocational education track, according to their average achievement. The reforms of 2001 effectively replaced the former educational ladder and introduced a new structure comprising three stages: primary, preparatory and secondary. A particular focus was placed on vocational education, the intake of which has at times been half of the total number of students at the post-basic stage. There have also been some quality-oriented projects introduced into the curricula, such as the comprehensive educational curriculum, the health culture program, and others, with the support of international organisations.

The Syrian government had undertaken a step similar to ‘the nationalisation’ of education in 1957 when it took complete control over the private schools whereby it appointed the principal and director and determined the tuition paid by the pupils. As a result, the owners of these schools lost control over the destiny of their schools and were forced to accept any teacher or administrator sent by the government, regardless of her/his administrative or educational abilities to steer the schools. As a result, several of them resigned from their involvement in schools. The matter continued thus until 1997, when the government decided to consolidate private and public education as part o...