Education Reform in the Arab World Needs Radicals, Not Technocrats
Decades of curriculum reform, institutional restructuring, and international benchmarking have produced modest results. The problem is not the tools — it is the ambition.
Every few years, a new report arrives documenting what everyone in the Arab education sector already knows: PISA scores are low, graduate employment outcomes are poor, and the gap between what universities produce and what economies need is wide and growing.
And every few years, governments respond with the same toolkit: curriculum reform committees, public-private partnership frameworks, international advisory panels, and ambitious ten-year plans that are replaced by new ten-year plans before they can be evaluated.
The problem is not the toolkit. It is the assumption underlying it — that Arab education systems are essentially functional systems that require optimisation, rather than fundamentally misconceived systems that require reimagination.
Prof. Ahmed Zaki is a guest contributor to Imprint writing on education policy.
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