|
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has emphasized education’s importance as a fundamental human right and a necessary element of development. Education encompasses the scope of social values, morality, tradition, religion, politics and history. It is the acquired body of knowledge that equips the emerging labour force with the necessary skills to ensure its active participation in economic development. The acquisition of literacy, arithmetic, and problem-solving skills improves the value and efficiency of labour. It creates a skilled and intellectually flexible labor force through training, expertise, and academic credentials. A professional working force enhances the quality of a nation's economic productivity and guarantees its suitability for global market competitiveness.. According to a recent research report by the United Nations Population Fund, countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Algeria have invested in family planning, healthcare, and education and have subsequently experienced more rapid economic development than the countries that were reluctant to invest in social development programs.
During the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, most countries of the region were under European colonization. Though the colonizing authorities were the first to introduce a compulsory education, access to modern (European-style) education was restricted to select elite. Colonial education in many ways was designed to shape local intellectual development and to limit their ability of local actors in challenging the colonizers’ political control, while enhancing the rule of the colonial administrations.
Prior to and during the same period, the native formal education system in the region was based on the inculcation of the Qur'an in the Islamic school, or Madrasa. This system increasingly competed with the newly introduced European educational system, though remained an important educational experience for many. Competition, however, was not due to Islamic refutation of Western culture, but it resulted from the colonizer’s willingness to advance a dominant and superior western culture while annexing further territories in the MENA region and imposing restrictions on nationals.
|
