Education matters

What is the purpose of a school? Have you ever actually asked yourself that question?  Obviously it is a place of learning where children from ages three to 18 learn about the world around them and how to function within it. But, schools also teach curricula that are generally decided upon by the government of the day and are designed to equip the children of today with the skills required to become the workforce of tomorrow.

Now that all sounds very sinister but just a brief step back through history to, say, the 20th Century will see for example in the UK a curriculum that was principally designed to enable students the basic functions required to work within the Industrial Revolution of 100 years earlier, since the issue of equipping a future workforce wasn’t being addressed.

Nowadays, however, the UK curriculum has changed remarkably, meaning that programming skills and functional IT literacy are standard in classrooms for children as young as four and this is because arguably, the government’s Department of Education woke up to the fact that the world is getting smaller and that if we are going to survive as a country moving forward, it needs students to be able to compete internationally as they move into the adult world of work; progress of sorts …

But that is the UK, so where does that leave countries like Bahrain? The reason I raise this point is that on taking a look at schools on the island, the ones that allege to be the best are often the ones offering a British-style curriculum, generally taught by Western-trained teachers and filled with the expatriate children of adults who won’t stick around long enough for the country to benefit from the education they received. 

I think that this is a very sad state of affairs and also a rather alarming one as it would appear that there is little or no long-term strategy in place to enable Bahrain to benefit from its expatriates in the ways that expatriates benefit from Bahrain.

But how can this issue be resolved? On face value it seems that it can’t since by its very nature, Bahrain is a transient country with foreign workers arriving and leaving on an almost daily basis. However, I believe it can, it will just take a little forethought and collaborative thinking and a slightly less elitist view from those schools on the island that exist within ivory towers. 

I believe that if you profess to be the best then you should prove it since as the great Winston Churchill once said: ‘success isn’t final’.  

The true measure of success is what you do with it and so if all certain schools do with it is pat themselves on the back and say ‘look at us, aren’t we wonderful!’ then in my opinion they aren’t successful at all. 

I believe that successful, independent schools should be reaching out to local schools on the island and creating working partnerships, sharing facilities and expertise. 

In doing this, international schools who offer nothing other than opportunities to succeed for a small number of transient, expatriate children and wealthier local families will be giving something of enormous value back to the country that hosts them. 

Now that’s a radical thought.