I met a friend from school time earlier today and as we were reflecting she said: “ we have more schools and the ignorance increased.” I stopped for instance and thought to myself: education with its deterioration is a recipe for destruction. What are we doing , we are having more educated people with certificates, but we don’t have knowledgeable people. We are having hundreds if not thousands of projects that tackle awareness and capacity building, and we are becoming dependent and locked.
Amid my desperate feelings of all what is taking place, I reminded myself of an issue that bothered me later, and as usual, talking about it does not bring any change.
Last month we were taken by surprise when the minister of education, who promised change in the educational system, of course for the best of our children, announced a competition in the English language in his name SABRI , the genius thing about this competition is the way the words were brought together in order to form a word that comprises his name: Skills Assesment Broad Requisite Inquiry, of course, there is no need to understand or analyse what the hell does this have with an English competition for schools where our children barely graduate with differentiating between a noun and a verb , and the pronunciation of the p and the b is part of the culture that defines English speaking Palestinians .
In times when children in classrooms will spend another cold winter with minimum equipment, and thousands of students from Kufr Aqab have unknown future after the closure of their schools. And as the “new” curriculum continue to suffer from disasters in the context;
I wrote an article a month ago concerning this issue, and I put out the question to the minister himself since when is education about a man’s seeking for attention, or personal accomplishment. The minister responded to the news agency by urging them to remove the article.
I understood that the minister felt regretful, or that was my limited mind thought. The editor in chief told me: you have to know that the most important thing is that your message reached? I was not satisfied because my article was not written to the minister, my article was that of a public opinion, it was about tackling an issue that should be discussed, we deserve to get the response on the behavior of the ministers in such cases. And here we were not talking about any minister. It is the education. It is all that is left for us to seek a generation that we want to build a future.
Somehow I thought maybe he would change his mind about the narcissist attempts of using his name for a competition and resolve the issues that are crucial in the schools.
Instead, the competition with the name stayed the same. The tragedy is in the context of the competition that requires from students to memorize as many words as some hundreds to deserve the trophy . an accomplishment that counts to the benefit of education that wants to promote change !!!!!!!! by insisting on keeping memorizing as the way of becoming achievers… in this specific case ..English speakers….
This whole state of no accountability only drags us to a hole assigned well in the inferno.