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Struggling With a New Curriculum

It’s here within the first few weeks of school that the students find that all is not good and that they have been cheated. They and their children have no clue about the curriculum, they don’t like it, the school is not keeping their promises, etc. With very few choices most parents just bear it, but what they don’t understand is that they may be inadvertently causing psychological damage to their children via foreign curriculum schools. At the end of it we have efforts such as Watani social development programmes, which have turned to edutainment to re-educate the nation and its expatriates, what it means to an Emirati and to live in the Emirates. I am afraid, that it might be a little late. Imagine, you spend twelve years learning about a culture, a society, and a way of life that is completely different from yours?

You will spend all of your academic life, wishing that you were somewhere else, or that you were somebody else, or that someone will have a brain to stop these revolting books and replace them with ones that have your name in them and has some people that look like you and live like you. The basic response for the average child is just to turn off; it’s just too hard to manage mentally.

For those who don’t have the chance or desire to move on to university in their own native country, this psychological damage will continue to move on with you at the education level in a foreign university.

There you have it, they are telling you that your tradition has no value here and you have to just leave it at the door. West is best; anything else is just excess, useless, baggage. Imagine what this does for the self-esteem of the student? What happens is a colonial type relationship is reborn. I have seen it played out here, where in a conversation between a British person and a non-Brit, the former is expected to simply nod and listen. Western authority reigns supreme, but is the world really all that better?

Recently, the Secretary of Education of the United States, Margaret Spellings, came to the UAE hawking her wares, satellite universities, which are slowly making their way to the Gulf and other cities abroad to replenish their dwindling student bodies in their home colleges as the funding for education gets cut. Add to that the lack adequate jobs. Going to college seems like not even worth the effort, especially when PhD holders with little connections end up teaching at high school, or working at the fashionable coffeehouses. As Naomi Klien puts it, America is in the era of the ‘joke-job”

So, there you have it, a new possibility of exchange. Americans have never been afraid of expanding their territory, and of course, the Middle East can be a part of it. But Ms. Spellings, marketing scheme was a little awry; as she went on talking about how in this region, writing began, codes of law were formed, and a civilisation was created. I thought to myself, All of this happened in the Emirates? No, it wasn’t the Emirates or not even Oman, it happened in a city along the Tigress and the Euphrates, the city of Babylon. Yeah, she was counting on the ignorance and/or the civility of her audience. Didn’t anyone notice her nerve? How dare she come here and talk about the once greatness of Iraq, while her boss was destroying it rock by rock, to peddle her storefront colleges! This being the East, she knew that they would just swallow her ignorance and that if they would be nice enough not to point our her mistakes.In times like these, wonky geography can be a dangerous thing, so I have to beg the question, do we want to be educated by a culture that seems to not care enough to get the basics straight? I know, materially, these guys got it going on. Power, wealth, knowledge, but remember the lovely secretary’s boss, G. W. Bush, who prior to becoming President couldn’t find Pakistan on the map; however lately, he’s been on target every time.

Looking at the curriculums of some of these schools, I wonder, really what benefit are they? Many of them offer the same things or courses that have no real use here. So, as a degree holder from these schools, I have to ask, where do you go afterwards? One school’s programmes were particularly striking in that the average course lasted two weeks. The subject being something enormous like the history of philosophy and you will learn it all in a fortnight?

In the US, there is programme called ‘No Child Left Behind’ (NCLB). Its aim is to ensure that all children get a chance to learn. Well, I am not so sure. In its seventh year its success rate is an average 60 per cent, with the pressure being so high that there has been an increase in drop outs -- so much so -- that some have called it a silent epidemic. I found a child advocacy website, nochildleftbehind.com which gives a crystal clear picture of the real deal with education in the US today.

Education in the UK is not so different, with their Every Child Matters scheme, which focuses on Literacy and numeracy also. But don’t our children matter too? Why should they be left behind? So, if they have it all fangled up over there, what about our youth over here? How can we be sure that they won’t mug it up over here? We should take the hint from Ms Secretary, who can’t tell the difference between United Arab Emirates and Iraq.

Maryam Ismail is a Sharjah-based Arab American writer. She can be reached at: maryam@journalist.com