1. The academic year is almost over, so this article is a reminder to parents, schools, governments and all
of us.
Many advances in various scientific fields have taken place, to mention but a few the biosensors, the
freezing of embryos, Kyoto protocol, amnesia drugs, and stopping the growth of children with a sever
handicap. Of course if you check these and many more advancements in science and technology you
will notice that almost all were created in laboratories of high standing universities in the world. Also if
you check these advancements you will notice that those universities have received research grants
from top government bodies and corporation who are very interested in buying these researches to
progress further economically.
These discoveries and knowledge advancements could not take place if research was not the main
component in most universities curricula; this is the one thing we look for when checking a university
for our students. In our part of the world research does not feature at all in any course, whilst in other
parts of the world children as young as 8 or 9 start to research certain subjects in libraries, internet and
other sources.
I had a look a the number of high school graduates in our part of the world, very few have graduated
from the science stream, and to top it up very few boys have taken science as a discipline. Who is going
to be our next Einstein? It’s the responsibility of us the academics, the government, and the companies
to start building on this lack of science and research soul in our education system.
True that many new initiatives had taken place in the gulf area to establish biotechnology centres and
marine centres, however I can see no links between these centres and the schools in the Gulf, we do not
take the students to these centres so they learn about them. Many of us now belong to the audio/visual
theory of learning, thus if the students see for themselves what they will be doing later on if they enter
the science stream, they may be encouraged to join a university and specialise in a scientific field. But,
we take students to malls and fun cities and waste their learning time.
Also our governments should invest even more in research and encourage it, how else can we be closer
than 500 light years from the first world countries. A small point to remember, the Arab world spends
0.0002% of its GDP on research. You can Google how much the western world spend, and see the
difference for yourself.