RIYADH: Dr. Abdullah Bin Abdul Rahman Al-Othman, president of King Saud University, has criticized the formation of one committee after another, just for the sake of amending an educational course or an academic strategy. He said the abyss between poverty and fortune can only be filled by the creation of distinctive colleges to transform the Kingdom from a country that consumes knowledge to one that produces and exports it. It is a crucial question, he said, why the Kingdom lags behind countries in international mathematics and science quizzes. Dr. Al-Othman made the comments while opening a meeting of college deans, organized by the Faculty of Education at King Saud University. He pointed out that developing the country's educational system does not require huge investments, but it does require the development of teachers. Dr. Al-Othman described the educational environment and the process of developing curricula as excellent, but he said students must be taught to do more than memorize information. “No matter how much money we invest in the development of the educational environment and syllabi, it will not help as long as teachers do not differentiate between the learn-by-heart educational method and the reactive educational method,” he said. He said teachers who think that they are the only sources of information will continue to focus on the learn-by-heart educational method, which will only lead to furthering the authority of unqualified teachers. Dr. Al-Othman said that in this century, there are two sources of a nation's fortune. The first is a learned generation and the second is creative opinions – both of which are found in universities and professional educational institutions. He said it should be understood that natural resources are no longer a sufficient source of a nation's revenues and that the major source has become what brains can produce. Dr. Bakri Matouq Assas, president of Umm Al-Qurra University, said he and his colleagues in the country's professional institutions must achieve their goals, especially because the government has been aggressive in supporting higher education. “I urge myself and my colleagues at all the higher institutions to exert all efforts to realize these aspirations,” he said. “The huge support given to the Ministry of Higher Education in the new budget serves as a strong motivation for us to achieve a quantum leap.”
