By Muhammad Aburumman
Ministry of Education records show that there are 13 schools in Jordan valley where none of the Tawjihi's literary stream students passed the last test. In the Norther Badia, however, records show that there were 25 schools were none has passed.
Naturally, these disappointing results are only the tip of the iceberg of our education's reality. The failure rate, and the generally low grades this year uncovered a major scandal in the Jordanian education's history; thousands of students who had high grades during the last years were not qualified at all - they relied on cheating because of a slacking state and weak ministry of education that allowed such violations and crimes to go by unnoticed.
As such, the current Minister of Education, Dr. Muhammad Thnaibat, deserves the credit for painting a real picture of the status of education, after controlling the testing halls, limiting cheating, and preventing leaks, for us to see once again the worsening status of education.
The real picture is not complete. The minister has, thankfully, preventing the security breaches of the testing halls, but the new technological cheating methods are hard to be controlled. The current problem is in the ethics. The current, low passing percentage is still deceiving too.
Let's get back to those schools were none succeeded, and to the nature of education in the governorates, to uncovered a bit of the current "masked illiteracy". Do you remember when Dr. Thnaibat talked about more than 100,000 students in primary education (22% of the students in Jordan), who do not know how to read the letters and the numbers?
Instead of facing this "natural disaster", that is the collapse of the education sector, the government is trying to escape by shifting the problem from the schools to the universities, through exceptions in university admissions, drowning universities in a huge number of unqualified students.
In this bitter, heaped up education reality, one supposes the situation will have a devastating effect on officials, politicians, and citizens - we are in grave danger; our only wealth, the individuals, is being bulldozed, going through years of drought.
Please do not compare us to our Arab neighbors, and tell me we have better qualifications. They own riches, money, and alternatives, while our only capital is education, knowledge, and culture. It was supposed that Jordan today would be the Harvard of the Arab world. What is happening, however, is exactly the opposite.
What is the solution? shortly, and simply, give power over education revolution and a strategic plan to reform it and develop schools to those with experience and are trusted; allocate a large number of the Gulf grants to this vital issue, so you could save our future.
The education level in the governorates especially is a sign of a culminated sociopolitical-crisis, rife injustice, and a defect in the political infrastructure in the country.
@m_rumman
This article is an edited translation from the Arabic edition.
