Educate...

Let's face it. We have a lot of clever people in this country, but most of them manage to go brain-dead as they grow older, because of the lack of a strong educational system to keep their brains active. We have a few good private schools, but others aren't so great, and the government school system? Well, no comment there. Many people in our society are ignorant, dependant, financially unstable, and so on..

Shouldn't we take a clue from somewhere like Singapore? In the late 1950's/early 1960's, the country was filled with problems like mass unemployment, housing shortages, racial tensions, and so on. Sounds familiar? Singapore was in a bit of a pickle, and the future didn't seem too bright.

Look at Singapore now, a little under 50 years later: a financial powerhouse, the world's fourth largest forex trading center (after NY, London and Tokyo), a huge manufacturing and electronics economy, is considered the most business-friendly economy in the world, and is currently the 18th wealthiest country in the world (per capita GDP).

Quite a change? Difficult to promote? Well, it was pretty simple actually; faced with a number of disasters (unemployment, housing, etc), the government didn't decide to try and tackle them one by one. For one, they didn't have the resources to fix them, and second, it would take a great lot of effort and knowledge, of which they had little experience. Also, any problems fixed would soon re-surface as you get an increasing population, time passes, etc.

So they thought long-term; let's build a strong education system, schools, college, universities. Let's provide the highest standards of education, so as the children grow, they learn how to cope and deal with the problems that exist, and will have the sufficient knowledge to fix them. They'll grow, they'll learn, they'll create jobs, businesses, sectors, they'll find solutions.

True enough, within one generation, the whole country was turned around. Within two generations, the country has become one of the most successful economies in the world. And by next generation, who knows where it will be?

Can we have some of that here? Some education? Some strong, quality education? Reform all the schools, bring in excellent teachers, audit our univesities, fix our whole educational system. We have smart people in Bahrain; most of them just go brain-dead under our current system, we need our people to be challenged, strengthened, given the tools to promote and advance. We need that to get rid of the corruption, the unemployment, the shortages, the ignorance..

Please.. Fix our educational system..