Globalization and Its Impact on the Education System in Saudi Arabia - Essay Example

? Impact of Globalization on the Management of Education System Globalization has a profound impact on people’s everyday lives. It has allowed the movement of people across boundaries something that was not always the case. The education in Saudi Arabia has not been left out. This article, therefore, has undertaken to look at the impact that globalization has had on educational reforms. It will further look at the issues that still need to be addressed for there to be a good quality education in the Saudi kingdom in order for graduates in the country to be able to be globally competitive. Introduction In order to understand this topic, this article will start by defining the key concepts that are involved. One of these concepts is the term globalization. According to Harvard Professors Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, understanding this term requires one to grasp another important term known as globalism (Bauman, 1998). Globalism is seen as a state of the world networks involving interdependence of multi-continental distances (Bisley, 2007). This interconnection involves the movement of information and ideas, people and force, as well as, capital and goods. It also involves the environment and biologically relevant substances such as acid rain or pathogens. Therefore, when defining globalization, Keohane and Nye state that it is the complete integration of globalism at a deeper or geographical level (Holton 1998). Globalization and Education in the Developing World: Case Study of Saudi Arabia The world as it is currently has attained the tag of being a ‘global village’ (Holton 1998). This means that there is a higher level of interaction between different countries today than was the case 100 years ago. Currently, the issues affecting one country can easily be replicated in another country as witnessed in the spread of the Arab Spring from Tunisia all the way to Syria. Technology has ensured that there is faster seamless communication between people in two very distant regions. This way, a person in Africa can communicate one-on-one with a relative in France. In this way, the world as is has been opened up to more scrutiny and so has the formats of education all over the world (Bisley, 2007). Saudi Arabia is a state renown for its oil wealth and the fact that it is reined over by a monarch. The system of education in this country like in many developing countries has a lot of emphasis on university education (Ramady, 2010). This means that white collar jobs are mainly preserved for the university elite in the country. As a result, this makes technical studies appeal less as they are associated with failures. As stated above, this is a common occurrence around the developing world, and, as a result, the technical training institutions do not get as much funding as the universities. Saudi Arabia has not many natural resources apart from oil (Ramady, 2010). This means that it has to depend on other forms of resources to allow it to move ahead. One of these resources is the human manpower (Ramady, 2010). The most important avenues for creating this manpower are through education. According to organizations that promote knowledge based economies such as the World Bank, higher education has a direct correlation with the country’s productivity (Ramady, 2010). This means that higher education has a direct impact on the skill level of people in a country, which in turn affects the quality of work that they produce. There is also the additional aspect of the remuneration that these people receive, which further translates to an improved standard of living. As seen above, technical education is not one that draws a lot of the populace in the country as it has a low remuneration. This is a worrying trend for a country like Saudi Arabia because being a developing country; it requires a lot of people trained in the technical studies. This means that there is a need to look at this matter. It is important that the government encourage people to take these courses by popularizing them. This means that the government can undertake to upgrade the status of the technical training institutions. Doing this will eventually lead to people wanting to undertake these courses. The government can also sponsor projects that will utilize these projects in a bid to create the impression that these courses are important. Today unlike 100 years ago, the lives of the youth are influenced by the economic, social cultural and technological events that are shaped beyond national borders (Lauder, et al., 2006). The country needs to invest highly in the education of its people because this has the capacity to produce external benefits, which are very instrumental in promotion of knowledge-driven economic and social development (Ramady, 2010). When it comes to scientific and technical innovations, Saudi Arabia has developed a negligible amount of patents. This means that the country has little to benefit when it comes to patents (Ramady, 2010). The country also has invested little in its education system thus this can be explained as the reason behind the low adoption of science and technology. However, other countries such as Singapore, Malaysia and Korea that have invested even less on their education systems have a much higher capacity when it comes to sustained economic growth (Ramady, 2010). As seen above, adoption of science and technology has its benefits on the country. One of these benefits is in the production sector. In essence, the adoption of science ant technology has the effect of making the entire process much cheaper. This in return will lead to cheaper goods in the market thus leading to improved lives. On the other hand, this has the long term effect of ensuring that the country has a sustainable level of economic development. This is the rationale for rating Saudi Arabia poorly in comparison to Singapore, Malaysia and Korea. These countries have put in place mechanisms of harnessing the benefits of science and technology thus the status of their economies in comparison to Saudi Arabia (Ramady, 2010). In the modern world especially in the developing world, techno-scientific development has a crucial role. This is because the developing world has a high level of scarcity of resources. Due to this, the adoption of science and technology in a comprehensive scale will serve to ensure that the country can ‘unlock’ as is, the hidden resources (Beck, 1992). Equally, adoption of science and technology ensures a more reasonable allocation of resources in a country (Bisley, 2007). In Saudi Arabia, for example, the ownership of the oil resources is limited to a few individuals. This means that even though the country has the oil reserves, the oil wealth does not fully trickle down to the masses. On the other hand, were the country to adopt technology and science, there would be a drastic change. This is because people will be learning the technical skills which will lead to new innovations coming up in the country (Bauman, 1998). As a result, people will be able to join the ranks of the Silicon Valley elite who have reaped big in terms of science and technology (Beck, 1992). According to Marx and Webber, there was a gravitation of society towards the distribution of socially produced a wealth in an unequal but ‘legitimate’ way. In the current settings, this overlaps wither the concept of risk society (Beck, 1992). This concept seems to address the risks and hazards of modernization. It looks into ways of minimizing, dramatizing or channeling the risks and hazards (Beck, 1992). The risk society will look at ways that will ensure that the risks and hazards are kept from interfering with modernization as well as maintaining tolerable levels socially, ecologically, medically and psychologically (Beck, 1992). This can be done well with the education system within the country. This education must orient the learners towards the management of among others actually or potentially utilized technologies (Beck, 1992). In the same breath, there is an important issue to be focused on namely the demand for the skills obtained after school, as well as, the students’ own perception of their skills. Most of the time new graduates will prefer to start their own trades rather than seek employment in the corporate world. The main barrier to these graduates seeking employment is that technical courses do not pay that well (Budhwar and Debrah, 2001). At the same time, the youth in Saudi Arabia view the technical jobs a menial and of low status. Meeting the Globalization Demands According to Ramady (2010), there is a shift in the country’s education system. The main reason behind this is the need to reorient the education system along the lines that will allow it to meet its development objectives. This means that the country is looking to ensure that the education system meets the set development objectives both qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Education has been discussed as an important natural recourse geared towards the growth of the nation. On the other hand, it is imperative to touch on the level of brain drain that occurs within a country when the people attain tertiary education. In most if not all developing countries the issue of brain drain is quite a dire one. A lot of the graduates will soon leave the country in search of a better life in the developed world thus leaving the country to grapple with the aftermath. Generally the talk currently is oriented towards what education can do for the economy and not vise versa as was the case before (Rosenberg, 2000). In the older outlook, the education was as a social policy a form of buying the goodwill of the masses and legitimizing its stay in power. This has, however, ceased to be the case currently. As a result of the people becoming more and more attentive to their rights, they are in a position to question why things are as they are. In the Kingdom, for example, the resent protest in the pursuit of reforms all over is an indication of this. In the country, there are, however, some important milestones that have been achieved. One of these is the establishment of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology back in 2009. This institution is managed by a team of both local and foreign who form the board of trustees (Zuhur, 2011). The mode of instruction in this institution is English. This was established to try and reduce the numbers of those people leaving the country to places such as the United States, Egypt, and Beirut among other places in search of tertiary education. According to Zuhur, there is a limited amount of academic freedoms that are very limited. Zuhur (2011) posits that the peer review rights take a back seat when compared to the rights of seniority. The level of peer review though practiced does not quite come close to the position that is in the West. Faculty members cannot encourage too liberal thought especially in the arts courses most of which are just being introduced (Zuhur, 2011). This means that the political freedom in the country is not that clear. This is in contrast to the globalization tenets. Though this is arguable depending on the point of view of the source of globalization, the one point that is clear is that the global community is more tolerant of open, democratic space (Bisley, 2007). As an important part of developing the education of the country, there is, therefore, a need for the political elite to allow such reforms into the country. As it stands now the situation on the country, is dire thanks in part to the measures taken against terrorism which have allowed the government to take away some liberties (Zuhur, 2011). Additionally the top academia is not very involved in the teaching of students. This is a great loss to the student body as these people are more knowledgeable in their specific areas of study. The end result is that the students are taught by less learned lecturers who will not quite have the same effect as these top scholars. These scholars are engaged in various capacities with the government, and the impact this has on education is negligible (Zuhur, 2011). There is, therefore, a need to improve on this matter to ensure that the academia is ably developing the country’s future work force. Another important discrepancy within the educational system in Saudi Arabia is the matter of the lecture methods that are used within the institutions of higher learning. According to Zuhur (2010), these methods are mainly top down. The students are expected to be passive attendees to these classes whose main role is to listen and write what the teacher has to say. This is not the same as in many parts of the world where the students are allowed to participate more and ask as many questions relevant to the topic as the wish. This method means that the learning process does not quite take effect in the students, and one of the end results is the high incidences of cheating, grade inflation and failure and dropout rates among the student fraternity (Zuhur, 2011). In this regard, this matter needs to be addressed in order to pave the way for quality of education offered within these institutions to be of international levels. Education from a Cultural Perspective In this segment, the area of concern will be how globalization has impacted on education and culture of the people of Saudi Arabia. To this extent it is important to evaluate the different cultures with regard to education. First of all, the education system was for a long time biased in favor of the boy child in society. Determination of what subjects one could study was based on one’s gender (Lauder, et al., 2006). This is now not the case especially with the introduction of mass schooling in the kingdom. In this context, it is imperative to articulate on the milestones of the country’s public education since its inception in 1930. Among other issues, the education system has seen the increase in the rate of enrolment of girls in school from 25% in 1970s to approximately 50% of the student population in the year 2000 (Lauder, et al., 2006). Also, another encouraging aspect of the education system in the country is the keen interest that the country’s ruler has taken in the matter even allocating space in his official website to the follow up of this matter. It is also important to report the valuable role that education has played in conjunction with globalization in Saudi Arabia. Here, a culture that has historically subjected women to arranged marriages and polygamy is slowly dying out (Long, 2005). Due to the progress that the mass schooling which does not discriminate gender has made, a lot of women are becoming more educated. This means that the process of marriage is now determined by factors like compatibility, as well as, the need to acquire higher education is determining the issue of marriage (Long, 2005). The net effect of this is that a woman now has more freedom to pursue her educational dream without the weight of marriage weighing her down. Conclusion From the findings of this article, globalization has had an impact on the country of Saudi Arabia. On how much impact there has been is a subject of discussion. Clearly globalization has enabled the girl child to get more education as does the boy child. However, it is worrying to see that the kingdom has maintained a high level of restrictions on the academia when it comes to academic freedoms. All in all, it is indispensable to change the norm and encourage the highly schooled academicians to be more involved in the teaching process. References: Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization: the human consequences. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: towards a new modernity. California: Sage Publications Ltd. Bisley, N. (2007). Rethinking globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Budhwar, P. & Debrah, Y. A. (2001). Human Resource Management in Developing Countries. London: Routledge. Holton, R.J. (1998). Globalization and the Nation State. London: Macmillan Press. Lauder, H. et al. (2006). Education, globalization, and social change. Oxford [u.a.]: Oxford Univ. Press. Long, D. E. (2005). Culture and Customs of Saudi Arabia. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Ramady, M. A. (2010). The Saudi Arabian Economy: Policies, Achievements, and Challenges. New York: Springer Science+ Business Media, LLC. Rosenberg, J. (2000). The follies of globalisation theory. London; New York: Verso. Zuhur, S. (2011). Middle East in Focus: Saudi Arabia. California: ABD-CLIO, LLC. Read More