For him who embarks on the path of seeking knowledge Allah will ease for him the way to paradise.
—PROPHET MUHAMMAD
Illiteracy has never shamed Saudis. No less an exemplar than the Prophet Muhammad could not read or write. For nearly two decades, the Angel Gabriel spoke Allah’s revelations to Muhammad, who repeated them to his followers. As with Muhammad, hear and repeat is the foundation of all Saudi education.
To this day, the concept of educational inquiry is barely nascent in Saudi Arabia. Students from kindergarten through university for the most part sit in front of teachers whose lectures they repeat back to them like echoes. Small wonder, then, that schools are just one more tool for constricting and controlling the minds and lives of Saudis.
Public education in the kingdom did not begin in earnest until the 1960s. At that time, only 2 percent of Saudi girls and 22 percent of Saudi boys attended any sort of school. As a result, even today, it is common for cabinet ministers and successful businessmen to be the sons of illiterate parents. Since those days Saudi Arabia has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on education and today spends a larger share of gross domestic product on education than does the United States. Yet the results can only be called catastrophic. In comparison with students around the world, Saudis repeatedly perform at or near the bottom. Nearly half of the kingdom’s schools are in run-down rented buildings. Native Saudi male teachers in K–12 come from the bottom 15 percent of their university classes. This helps explain why almost half the kingdom’s higher education faculty is imported, mostly from other Muslim countries. Better-qualified men choose more lucrative careers, and highly qualified women are not allowed to teach male students. Altogether, in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, good education is one thing money cannot buy.
Saudi Arabia’s failed education system matters for reasons that go far beyond wasting good minds. In a country where more than 60 percent of the population is under twenty years of age, the result is a huge pool of uneducated young men who are not qualified for the jobs they seek and a similarly large pool of better-educated young women who are not permitted to take jobs for which they are qualified. As a result, excluding the Saudi military, there are more than twice as many foreigners employed in the kingdom as Saudi citizens. More alarmingly, unemployment among twenty- to twenty-four-year-olds is an astounding 39 percent—45.5 percent for women and 30.3 percent for men. (The official unemployment rate is said to be 10 percent.)
The implications of these sorry statistics aren’t just educational and economic—they also involve national security, always the predominant concern of the ruling Al Saud family. These millions of uneducated and undereducated, unemployed and underemployed youth make up the pool within which the extremists trawl for recruits, with their line and lure that the Al Saud are selling out Islam to the West. Sadly, that line did not disappear when Osama bin Laden’s body sank into the Arabian Sea.
For all these reasons, education has become a high priority for the regime, with money the least of the obstacles. Education spending has tripled this decade. At 137 billion Saudi riyals ($37 billion) in 2010, it now accounts for more than 25 percent of the country’s annual budget. To underscore his determination to reform the kingdom’s failing education system, King Abdullah named his nephew and son-in-law, Faisal bin Abdullah, a Stanford University graduate, as the new minister of education in 2009 and appointed the first-ever Saudi woman of ministerial rank, Norah al Faiz, as deputy minister of education. To encourage modernization in higher education, Abdullah ordered construction of the first ever co-ed university, which he placed under the management of Saudi ARAMCO to keep it free of influence from his own moribund Ministry of Higher Education.
All these efforts at reform, however, have simply intensified the battle between traditionalists and modernizers over education. For the religious establishment, controlling education is at least as important as controlling women because education is a key instrument for perpetuating a devout, conservative Islamic society. Most Wahhabi religious leaders see education as simply an extension of religion and want it to consist of mostly Islamic theology and history. Indeed, to some of these religious purists, studying science, foreign languages, or anything about the rest of the world is not merely irrelevant but also distracting and even dangerous, luring Saudi youth to worldly wickedness.
In the West, God is virtually unmentionable in public schools, and in America at least, even perfunctory school prayer is banned. By contrast, in Saudi Arabia all the public schools are religious, and the state mandates daily intensive studies of the Koran, beginning in first grade and consuming roughly half the school day. At the elementary school level, religious studies average a total of nine periods a week, while math, science, geography, history, and physical education combined average only twelve periods a week. In a Western country, a devout family might opt to put its child in a religious school to avoid a purely secular education. In Saudi Arabia, the child of a more secular family that chooses a private school still is required to spend much of the school day studying Islam. Indeed, Saudi educational policy states that one of its objectives is to promote the “belief in the One God, Islam as the way of life, and Muhammad as God’s Messenger.”
As a result of this educational philosophy, supported by parental and societal pressure, most Saudi students, even university graduates, choose education in soft subjects like religion, sociology, and Islamic history rather than the academic disciplines and practical skills that would equip them to compete in the private sector, where real jobs are available, rather than in the stagnant public sector. Worse yet, most Saudi students emerge even from college or university having learned how to memorize rather than how to think. In Saudi Arabia, religion is not a matter for deliberation and debate, in the classroom or anywhere else. It is Allah’s word that must be learned and then lived. Tellingly, the entire subject of philosophy, in which questions would be the core of a curriculum, is banned in Saudi.
Saudi schools weren’t always so fundamentalist. Tewfiq al Saif, a businessman in Qatif, contrasts his education in the 1960s, a time of relative relaxation, with the education his son received in the 1990s—and still would receive today. The father recalls his Jordanian-born teacher making him master the Koran, including the prevailing Wahhabi view that Shias (the minority sect in Saudi but the majority in Qatif) are heretics. Because young Tewfiq was a Shia, the Jordanian teacher told him, “Just write it, you don’t have to believe it.”
When his son attended school a generation later, his Saudi teacher taught that Shias are heretics and ordered the boy to go home and convert his parents to Sunni Wahhabism. Al Saif eventually sent his son abroad for education, but the majority of Saudi families aren’t so fortunate. The fact is that all too many Saudi students emerge from school knowing little more than the Koran and believing not only in the tenets of their own religion but also that most of the rest of the world is populated by heretics and infidels who must be shunned, converted, or combatted.
In Saudi Arabia, the religious establishment does not merely exert a powerful influence on education; education is its wholly owned subsidiary. Education began with boys memorizing the Koran with religious scholars. It was not until 1951 that public education (still only for boys) began to be available in what then were big villages like Riyadh and Jeddah, and even then the teachers were mostly religious scholars. Any family seeking a better-rounded education for its sons sent them abroad, primarily to Cairo or Beirut. At that time, Prince Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, who was viceroy of the Hejaz (later King Faisal), was confronted by angry religious leaders, who accused the schools in Jeddah, the largest city of the Hejaz, of teaching magic (chemistry) and atheism (physics). Faisal called the director of education before the religious leaders and asked if he was indeed teaching chemistry and physics. “Yes,” he said. “I have to teach those subjects to get students into Cairo and Beirut universities.” The wise prince said to the director of education, “Don’t teach chemistry. Teach the nature of substances. Don’t teach physics. Teach the nature of things.” Faisal crossed out the titles on the sheaf of handwritten teaching materials his education director held and wrote in the new ones. The religious leaders departed, pleased with their prince’s devotion—and Saudi boys continued to learn chemistry and physics under a new name.
In the 1960s, when Faisal became king, he championed the creation of public schools across the kingdom for boys—and also girls. The largely illiterate nation had few qualified teachers, so the government dispatched emissaries abroad, mostly to Egypt and Jordan, to recruit teachers with substantive skills who also were devout Muslims. A hallmark of King Faisal’s reign was an effort to create an Islamic alliance in the Middle East to counter the Arab nationalism of Egypt’s president, Gamel Abdel Nasser. When Nasser, a nationalist strongman and sworn enemy of Saudi Arabia, turned on his country’s conservative Muslim Brotherhood, King Faisal welcomed those religious conservatives into Saudi Arabia as scholars and teachers, reinforcing the fundamentalist hold on the young Ministry of Education, founded in 1954 under his predecessor and half-brother, King Saud. It’s a grip that has yet to be broken.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, King Fahd, who served as the kingdom’s first minister of education, as we have seen, gave the religious establishment free rein to dictate what went on in educational institutions—and nearly every other aspect of Saudi life. By 1991, when U.S. troops entered Saudi to help evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, the beehive of fanatics bred during the preceding decade turned on the royal family—and on the religious establishment that supported the Al Saud. These radical Islamic critics saw the established religious scholars as tools of the Al Saud and the Al Saud as lackeys of the American infidels. In short, King Fahd (and the royal family) was hoist on his own petard.
The rulers imprisoned some of their critics and bought off others, believing they had suppressed extremists, but in reality these radical religious fundamentalists simply went underground, only to erupt with deadly attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and, of much more direct concern to the Al Saud, bombings and other terrorist attacks inside Saudi Arabia in 2003.
Belatedly awakened to terrorism’s threat, the royal family in recent years seriously has sought to combat extremism to protect itself. Curbing extremism, they realize, requires changing the educational system both to teach a more tolerant version of Islam and to prepare Saudi youth to qualify for jobs. Even the king, however, has found it hard to institute reforms that significantly challenge the entrenched religious-educational bureaucracy.
“Invading a country is easier than changing educational curriculum,” the late Ghazi al Gosaibi, a confidant of King Abdullah, quipped when asked why the king couldn’t make more progress with his education reform agenda. Gosaibi, a poet and novelist whose day job for nearly forty years included various ministerial and ambassadorial posts, was an outspoken intellectual almost always out of step with the kingdom’s religious conservatives. His books, often critical of regimes in the region and the lack of freedoms in Saudi, were banned in that country until just a few weeks before his clearly impending death from cancer in 2010. “I always referred to Abdullah as the ‘loyal opposition,’ ” he once told me, “because in the eighties Abdullah wrote a long memo to the king describing how poor Saudi education was.”
Abdullah finally got his chance to try to reform education once he became king in 2005. He announced a 9-billion-Saudi-riyal ($2.4 billion) project to transform the way the kingdom’s 5.5 million students are taught. This so-called tatweer, or reform project, was set up outside the educational bureaucracy. Some fifty boys’ and a like number of girls’ schools were selected to serve as models. Teachers were sent to retraining to help them abandon memorization methods in favor of teaching students critical thinking aimed at solving problems.
To get an idea of what, if anything is changing, I visit a tatweer school in Buraidah, a town in central Arabia so conservative that parents there protested the introduction of girls’ schools in the 1960s. In the 1980s, Buraidah still was so insular I was not permitted to visit; religious fundamentalism was ascendant there and across the kingdom. Even now my translator and I are met at the guarded checkpoint to the city and followed in marked cars by agents of the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Education to “assure our security”—and keep track of our movements.
At the school, a group of young Saudi women dressed in native costumes is singing the national anthem. This in itself is a bit of a reform, because Wahhabi religious scholars object to any celebration of nationalism as being in conflict with their view that believers belong only to the umma, or community of believers, which transcends borders and polities. (In an effort to build national identity among Saudis, King Abdullah has insisted on celebrating the kingdom’s founding on September 23, 1932, with a national holiday, even though religious leaders oppose any holiday other than celebrations marking the end of Ramadan and Hajj.)
This token innovation, followed by readings from the Koran, sadly is paralleled in the classroom. While teachers point proudly to their new electronic “smart boards,” most, on this day at least, are using them only as props, not for pedagogy. Indeed, as far as I can see from visiting half a dozen classrooms, education, notwithstanding expensive new gadgetry, still consists largely of the old memorization—hear and repeat. The educational process seems as ritualized as the ceremonial tea and dates graciously offered by the school principal.
A second tatweer model school in Riyadh is somewhat more promising. Tatweer 48, located near King Saud University, is attended by the upper-class offspring of university professors. Principal Moddi Saleh al Salem proudly observes that this is the only tatweer girls’ school in Riyadh. The girls, all dressed uniformly in gray floor-length jumpers and gray-and-white-striped blouses, are a world apart from the reticent young women in Buraidah. There the English teacher read her class a word from the text, and in unison the girls repeated it. Here, in a tenth-grade English class, girls are asked to come to the front of the class in teams of four to present clever video scripts they have written and produced to supplement a chapter in their text on how to order in a restaurant. Each team of girls is composed, confident, and at ease presenting to a classroom of forty fellow students plus their school principal, Al Salem.
One particularly lively foursome discusses how to set the table. As their chosen narrator describes how to lay the plates, silverware, and glasses, her narration is illustrated on a screen behind her by a video that her group created with pictures pulled from the Internet. “If you are serving more than one wine,” the narrator continues reading from her script, “start the glasses from the right. Just remember L E R D—left for eating and right for drinking.” The teacher glances toward me, clearly chagrined that a visitor should hear her students discussing how to serve forbidden alcohol, yet she can’t hide her obvious pride in the quality of their spoken English, which, after all, is what she is responsible for teaching.
Under the umbrella of reform, the kingdom also has begun an even more controversial revamp of curricula to enhance math and science and to curb extremism in religious teaching. A committee that included government-selected religious scholars rewrote religion textbooks at government behest to encourage more tolerance of other religions, or at least to curtail teaching of intolerance against Christians, Jews, and Shia Muslims. For instance, the new religion textbook recounts how the Prophet visited a sick Jewish neighbor even though that man had thrown garbage at the Prophet’s front door. The new textbooks, which will be introduced into all Saudi schools by 2013, also define jihad as something only the ruler can declare rather than as an obligation on every Muslim, as asserted by Al Qaeda and fundamentalist religious scholars who support it.
Predictably, conservatives accuse the Ministry of Education of kowtowing to the West and undermining Islam, while modernizers see the textbook changes and the three extra hours of math and science a week as window dressing, completely inadequate to improve students’ preparation for the job market or to prepare them to practice a more tolerant Islam. Moreover, whatever the changes in curricula and texts, teachers are largely the same religious conservatives and are free to say what they will in a classroom.
“When you close the door, the teacher can always put the book aside and talk,” acknowledges Dr. Naif H. al Romi, deputy minister of educational planning and development, who helped lead the curriculum reform. “But that is true everywhere, not just in Saudi. With thirty thousand schools and half a million teachers, it is very hard to change a system quickly.” By contrast, in the tiny adjacent Gulf state of Qatar, which modernizers often cite as an education model, there are only two hundred schools.
It is all too common for students to correct their parents’ religious habits based on lessons learned at school. One father complains that his daughters tell him he isn’t allowed to pray at home but only in a mosque. So says their teacher. Similarly, the teacher, aware that these preteen girls have a male Arabic tutor at home, tells the girls they are too old at ten and eleven to be alone with an unrelated male. A female professor at King Saud University, who wears a scarf but not a face veil, complains that her daughter’s teachers have turned her into a one-girl Gestapo on the necessity of her mother’s veiling whenever she leaves her house. Realizing that even modest reform of Saudi education will take at least a generation, King Abdullah has sought to shortcut the process. In 2006 he began offering scholarships to male—and more surprisingly, female—students to go abroad for university studies. While Saudis came to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s for university education, in the 1980s and 1990s the government, responding to the dictates of religious conservatives, stopped providing scholarships to study abroad and reduced sharply (from 10,000 in 1984 to 5,000 by 1990) the number of Saudis who could get an education outside the kingdom. After September 11, that number shrank still further (2,500 in 2003), as visas dried up and Saudis feared going abroad. Determined to reverse that trend, King Abdullah launched his scholarship program, which in 2011 funded more than one hundred thousand Saudi students studying in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Almost all are expected to return home, creating a new cadre of educated Saudis. Whether they become a force for change upon their return, or don the mental blinkers of tradition along with their abayas and thobes, remains to be seen.
To try to jump-start reform in higher education at home, the king established the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, KAUST, at a cost of 10 billion Saudi riyals (nearly $4 billion), the country’s first co-ed university, created from scratch in only three years. With Saudi ARAMCO, the kingdom’s most efficient institution, in charge, the pristine new university opened on schedule in September 2009 with some six hundred students from around the world, including Saudis of both sexes. The founding president is Choon Fong Shih, a Singaporean and the only non-Muslim university president in the kingdom. Dr. Shih, a world expert in nonlinear fracture mechanics, earned his doctorate at Harvard and taught at Brown University.
A non-Muslim president and the mixing of men and women are remarkable innovations for Saudi Arabia. Equally jarring is the juxtaposition on campus of a mosque alongside a movie theater (the only cinema in the kingdom outside those on Saudi ARAMCO property). On campus, most students are dressed in modest Western attire. The Saudi women on campus, however, wear long black abayas, albeit without veils covering their faces. All the students receive full scholarships and pursue graduate studies in science with state-of-the-art laboratory facilities.
“Throughout history, power has attached itself, after God, to science,” the king said at opening ceremonies for the new university, some eighty kilometers outside Jeddah.” Humanity has been the target of vicious attacks from extremists, who speak the language of hatred, fear dialogue, and pursue destruction,” he added. “We cannot fight them unless we learn to coexist without conflict—with love instead of hatred and with friendship instead of confrontation. Undoubtedly, scientific centers that embrace all peoples are the first line of defense against extremists.” It might have been Barack Obama or David Cameron speaking.
Notwithstanding the king’s noble sentiments, it took a tense confrontation with religious conservatives and the sacking of a prominent sheikh to protect the king’s “dream of more than twenty-five years.” While his intercession on KAUST was at least a small victory for reform, the king cannot intervene in every issue in every school and so, day in and day out, the religious-educational bureaucracy remains largely impervious to reform. Whether the issue is who teaches or from what textbooks, what makes up the curriculum or what actually is taught in the classroom, reform still exists more on paper than in practice. By one estimate, fully 70 percent of the three thousand supervisors who directly oversee public schools around the kingdom are conservative Salafis, a more politically correct term for Wahhabis, whose priority is not educational reform but religious orthodoxy. Even at the university level, where reforms began and where reform arguably should be easiest, the obstacles are many and the results few.
“There is no critical thinking even in university,” says one political science professor at King Saud University in Riyadh. “Students just memorize and repeat. All they want is a diploma and a job in government. They don’t care about their country or about the Arabs or about freedom.” A sociology professor at the same university similarly laments the lack of curiosity among students. “Students aren’t curious; they don’t read so they have no background or knowledge with which to discuss issues,” he says. “I asked my students after the earthquake in Haiti where is Haiti. Most guessed Africa.”
Some Western students might make the same mistake, but what these Saudi professors really are fighting is the result of the years of mindless memorization among students and, more broadly, the intellectual inertia of a conformist society that values neither curiosity nor independent thinking. Many books are banned, libraries often are locked, and at any rate volumes are not permitted to be taken home from most of them.
There also are physical restraints to reform. The regime is seeking to make up for decades of neglect by funding the construction of more than 1,200 new schools across the kingdom in 2010 and completing construction of another 3,100 already under way. The funds are available, but ironically, given the vast size of this country, the land often is not. In or around population centers, much of the open land is owned by various princes or a few wealthy families who are holding it for future development and profit. So in many cases there literally is no available land on which to build a school. One might think royal princes would donate land or that the regime that gave it to them might demand some of it back. So far, neither has been the case.
On a visit to Hail, a poor province on the Iraq border, King Abdullah is reliably said to have been told by the provincial governor, one of his nephews, that there was no available land on which to build public facilities. The king, surveying a vista that included much open land, asked who owned it all. The answer: the defense ministry, a decorous way of saying the land was owned by the then minister of defense and royal half-brother, the late Crown Prince Sultan. The next day, by prearrangement, the governor, this time in the presence of both King Abdullah and Prince Sultan, again raised the issue of land to develop his poor province. King Abdullah coyly inquired, “Who owns all this land?” Prince Sultan, put on the spot, responded to the king that the land was “all yours” to dispose of. So Abdullah graciously accepted, and the governor got his land. Again, it is a nice example of what happens when the king personally intercedes, but by definition it is a rarity in a regime where even the king has to balance his priorities with those of his powerful half-brothers and their sons.
If reforming education in general faces multiple obstacles, educating girls should logically face even more. Yet here arguably more progress has been made than in any other area of Saudi educational reform. In 2002 religious police infamously allowed fourteen middle school girls to burn to death inside their Mecca school just after classes began one morning. The girls who tried to flee the burning school were forced back inside by the religious police because the girls were not fully covered in abayas and veils.
The national outrage that followed gave Abdullah the opportunity to remove girls’ schools from the supervision of religious authorities and put them under the Ministry of Education, which already controlled boys’ schools. Girls’ schools, at their creation in the 1960s, had been put under the control of the General Presidency for Girls’ Education, an autonomous government agency controlled by conservative clerics, as a compromise to calm public opposition to allowing (not requiring) girls to attend school. Now a new wave of public criticism emboldened Abdullah to reverse that decision, yet another instance of the Al Saud bending back and forth with prevailing winds.
Change of control, while progress, doesn’t necessarily mean substantive change. For example, in many girls’ schools, particularly those in rented buildings, safety inspectors—who invariably are male—are not permitted to enter the schools at any time the girls are present to inspect or enforce safety standards. Moreover, female students, much like medieval nuns, are locked inside their schools, and access is controlled by elderly male guards outside the high walls that surround all schools. The girls arrive in the morning and enter the school through a narrow portal, which then is locked behind them. When school is over, the door is unlocked, to allow the girls to be picked up by drivers or parents. At one such school I was conducted inside in the company of several senior women administrators of education for a tour. At the conclusion of the visit, the group knocked on the locked door to leave, and no one responded. The male caretaker had left his post. Phone calls finally produced him a few minutes later, but had there been an emergency inside, the students would have been trapped until either the female principal inside or the male guard outside unlocked the door. The tendency of elderly guards to wander off on personal errands during school hours has led some parents to propose that schools be safeguarded instead by professional security companies, but so far tradition prevails.
Despite all the limitations and the continued segregation, there are areas of small progress for young women. Women’s education clearly is better off under the control of even a religiously dominated Ministry of Education than under the direct control of religious authorities. The appointment of Norah al Faiz to head women’s education is a significant step, even if she is proceeding cautiously.
There are some outposts of outstanding education in the kingdom. Ahliyya School in Dhahran, founded in 1977 by Khalid al Turki, a successful businessman, and his Ohio-born American wife, Sally, is one. A private K–12 school, Ahliyya, with tuition of $6,500 a year, attracts mostly well-off students. Most of the girls are daughters of Saudi ARAMCO employees. During a visit with twenty senior class students, the most articulate and impressive women I encountered on visits to a dozen schools and universities in the kingdom, all said they had traveled to the United States, some 80 percent had visited European countries and 30 percent had visited Asian countries beyond Saudi Arabia. All intended to have careers and children simultaneously. Their teachers spend five weeks each year being trained in the latest methods to stimulate students to learn, not just recite. The girls have been taken abroad to compete with other international students in a Model United Nations debate, something unheard of for public school students. “The fact we wear long black robes doesn’t mean we can’t think,” says one young woman. “Things are changing fast,” she adds. “Five years ago my parents said I could never go to the United States to university. Two years ago they said maybe I could go with my brother. This year they said I could go alone.” Why the change? “Society has changed to accept more things for women,” she says matter-of-factly. And in her little corner of Saudi society, it has.
Another sign of progress: even a few law schools have opened for women in recent years. Although females still are not permitted to appear in court as lawyers, dozens of girls flocked to Riyadh’s Prince Sultan University law school when it opened in 2006. Maha Fozan, a freshman in this first group of law students, enthusiastically predicted in 2007 that by the time she graduated, women would be allowed to practice before a judge, not simply prepare legal arguments for their male colleagues to present. “The time has come. Society needs women lawyers. King Abdullah is behind us, so things will change,” she insisted with youthful certitude.
Sure enough, in this case optimism seems not to have been entirely misplaced. In late 2009, Maha, the articulate young woman whose confidence had visibly grown in the intervening years of her law studies, said emphatically, “I am going to have a career in law just like I planned.” Indeed, the minister of justice, another new appointee of King Abdullah, says he is evaluating a regulation to allow women to represent female clients before the kingdom’s male-only Sharia judges. The minister, Muhammad Abdul Kareem al Eisa, forty-six, not only agrees to meet me but also expresses support for the idea of women lawyers in courts. “A woman is allowed to speak in court and represent a woman now, but she isn’t yet licensed as a professional lawyer,” he says. “This is now under study, and I hope it will be completed and women will soon be licensed as professional lawyers.” Nothing happens quickly in Saudi Arabia, surely nothing as fundamental as changes to a judicial system under complete control of the religious establishment. But for now things do seem to be on track for women to be licensed as professional lawyers and permitted actually to practice in court.
Some other career opportunities also are opening these days for educated women, who traditionally have been limited to the fields of education (teaching only girls) or medicine (treating mostly women). A sprinkling of female university graduates now can be found in business, interior design, computer technology, and marketing, though these women represent only a token presence in overwhelmingly male workplaces. If a glass ceiling still limits career women in the West, concrete walls still block most in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia remains an almost entirely segregated society where men and women don’t mix at the water fountain—or almost anywhere else—so job opportunities remain restricted. For example, a young woman university graduate is offered a position in a small interior decorating firm that employs two men and one woman working in adjacent but separate offices. The young woman’s mother expresses fear that if her daughter takes the job and joins the other young woman in the female section, at some point the men and women will encounter each other in their work, and that encounter will be glimpsed by one of the omnipresent religious police, who then could arrest the young people for immoral mixing. “This will ruin my daughter’s reputation even though she is doing nothing wrong,” the woman frets. “I don’t want her to risk her life for this job.”
Such concerns are common to all women in the society, however well educated they may be. Only in the rarest of workplaces, such as the offices of multinational firms, can women function alongside men, and even at these offices there are occasional raids by religious police. The one institution exempt from all these conventions and restrictions is Saudi ARAMCO, which since its founding has operated as an innovative and international island in the largely stagnant Saudi sea. KAUST is now a second island. The government has made it clear that these islands—like foreign embassies in Saudi Arabia—are off limits to the religious police.
Whatever educational problems exist now, the government is going to have to run fast just to stand still, given the geyser of young people erupting from Saudi schools. The kingdom’s 5.5 million students will increase 20 percent to 6.2 million by 2022. At present, some 140,000 young men (and a similar number of young women) graduate from high school each year, but fewer than half gain admission to a Saudi university—even though between 2002 and 2006 the kingdom opened sixteen new universities, bringing the total to twenty-four public universities. The Princess Nora University, a massive campus for fifty thousand women, opened in 2011, making twenty-five. Private universities, located primarily in major cities, jumped from one to eight.
Of course quantity alone is not sufficient to meet the country’s need to train graduates for jobs in a global knowledge economy. “Families put kids on a track to get grades, not to develop as individuals,” says Dr. Muhammad al Ohali, deputy minister of educational affairs in the Ministry of Higher Education and the man in charge of crafting Saudi higher education reform plans for the next twenty years. “Knowledge these days expires quickly, so we have to find a way to set the fire in students to want to learn.” Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, minister of education and King Abdullah’s son-in-law, adds, “The king’s message is that oil is not our first wealth. Education is. We have to develop the people now.”
Easier said than done. Stephane Lacroix, a Saudi expert at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, sums up the battle over education in Saudi Arabia: “The education system is so controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, it will take twenty years to change—if at all. Islamists see education as their base so they won’t compromise on this.” As with the struggle over women’s role in society, the tug-of-war over education continues, with the religious still pulling the greater weight.