12:30pm
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2:00pm |
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"Education for Citizenship in the Arab World"
(Speakers)
Speaker: Muhammad Faour
Non-Resident Senior Associate, Carnegie Middle East Center,
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The current education reform efforts in the MENA region heavily focus on such "technical" aspects as building more schools, introducing computers to schools, improving test scores in mathematics and sciences, and bridging the gender gap in education. While necessary and important, the reform's current emphasis misses a basic human component: Students need to learn at a very early age what it means to be citizens who learn how to think, seek and produce knowledge, question and innovate rather than be subjects of the state who are taught what to think and how to behave. These attributes are essential if the region is to move away from its traditional reliance on "rents" in the form of oil and outside assistance, and toward the kind of system that empowers its citizens with the requisite skills to build self-generating, prosperous
economies and achieve a quality of life that can come through respect for diversity, critical thinking, creativity and exercising one's duties and rights as an active citizen.
This event is sponsored by the Executive Education Programs, the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs and the Campbell Public Affairs Institute.
More information...
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443-9248