The educational order around the world has mostly prioritized uncritical engagement, and rank and score chasing, over actual learning. The impact of this on students’ lives and prospects has been immense. Taking our experiences with three different Arab educational systems, we reflect on the way the educational order appeared in, and shaped, our lives.

Jenan Aljendi (Syria)

© private For those of us unable to pay private university fees, government universities were our refuge. This made the high school experience intense for a lot of us, as our results could have fateful consequences on what we would be allowed to study at the university level. Here, my journey started, as when I was unable to achieve the necessary school scores to get into pharmacy, my dreams and the course of my life changed as I entered the Faculty of Agricultural Engineering

I remember intently how I felt the moment I learned one of my classmates managed to get into the faculty of her choice because she could afford to pay private university fees. I felt immense anger as the class inequality that I had always experienced but never properly understood during my childhood came to the forefront. 

The state university I attended was similar to all the state’s other institutions, especially in its treatment of workers, employees, and students. This created a broken educational system, built on unquestioning memorization and uncritical engagement with what you’re learning. Expressing doubts or daring to ask questions was the number one enemy of this system. This produced a generation of students who did not understand what they were studying, and who needed to exert double the effort to actually learn what they should or learn what will get them into the job market. The private university experience was not much different, but students there did not actually need to study because they were in possession of the capital that would control our fates.

During this time, we as students enter a continuous spiral of studying and working in search of a better future. We must admit that this is a hard and grueling task. This led me to move to online learning, which allowed me to learn in a more open system and better balance my education with work, exactly as I needed.

It remains for me to work on the procedures to complete agricultural engineering in a free education system, one that teaches us to make decisions based on our thinking and analysis.
 

Bachar Bzeih (Lebanon)

© private Coming out of the Lebanese school system before the current economic crises, a student was traditionally presented with three academic paths: local private universities, the Lebanese University, or foreign universities. The last of these options was usually reserved for French-educated students pursuing a degree in France’s affordable university system, or for those on the highest end of the local income scale. For the rest of us, it was then a toss up between Lebanon’s only public university or one of the country’s numerous private ones. 

While popularly known for excellent and rigorous teaching standards, the Lebanese University was and continues to be chronically underfunded. This has led to it becoming laden with problems such as overcrowding, under maintenance, and recurring academic disruptions, with faculty and students regularly going on strike against the conditions imposed on them. Nevertheless, for a significant portion of the student population it remained the only viable option.
    
For those choosing to go the private route, it became a game of financial engineering, similar to what was going on at Banque du Liban at the time. Students are turned into companies, with parents pursuing investment and financing arrangements to get them through their start-up phase. Someone knows someone who knows someone at a financial aid office, another looks towards the myriad of grant givers, cops and soldiers rely on their institution’s generous grants, others look to family members abroad, and some hedge their life’s earnings on their children’s success. 

I ended up making it through my bachelor’s degree at the American University of Beirut through the combination of my parents' money, financial aid, and scholarships. What the experience taught me is that the education system reduces job market, and actual educational, considerations to the background, and is mostly centered around the reproduction of clientelist and class relations.
 

Hala Alshmi (Palestine/Gulf States)

© private Higher education is becoming increasingly inaccessible everywhere, with the inflation of tuition fees. In GCC countries, this inaccessibility extends to K-12 education, as children of low-income migrants may even remain out-of-school if their families cannot afford tuition at private schools. 

The school education system in GCC countries encompasses two starkly different routes, government schools and private schools. 

Government schools typically only admit nationals, with few exceptions which often involve only admitting some expat children whose parents have jobs at a select few places. Another way to limit the number of non-national students in government schools is practiced in the UAE and involves imposing low quotas on the number of non-nationals allowed to be admitted, even though expats outnumber nationals in countries like the UAE and Qatar. 

As for the private schools with imported curriculums, they charge thousands of dollars per semester, around the equivalent of many private universities’ tuitions. The divide between those who can enroll in these schools without extreme financial strain and those who can’t is dictated by nationality and class. While enrollment in private schools for nationals is subsidized by the government, and the tuition fees of Western students are covered by their parents’ workplaces, families with other nationalities tend to spend the better part of their income on K-12 schooling.

Migrants can live in GCC countries for generations and not get citizenship, perpetuating this relationship of unstable dependency and exploitation, which penetrates all aspects of life, including education.

Even amongst the private schools, levels of education and the opportunities provided to students fluctuate relative to their price tag, setting children up with unfair disadvantages that will affect their lives after school. Another issue with the privatization of schooling in the GCC is that the for-profit institutions prioritize reducing costs, at the expense of students and teachers.