ABSTRACT
When I visited Qatar in 1997, as a member of a three man UNESCO team to advise on diversification of secondary education, the country was then just flexing its muscles in preparation for the great leap forward that is taking place today, and that started three or four years ago. In April 2007, I was invited once again to Qatar to participate in and contribute to Georgetown University’s international conference on “Education and Change in Qatar and the Arab World.” When I used the word “deluge” in the title of my presentation to describe this leap forward, Dr. Osama Abi-Mershed, organizer and chair of the conference, responded that he found the title “very intriguing,” but then gently asked: “Are things so bad?” I did not answer him then, but if I had, I would have assured him of my good intentions, and reminded him perhaps that a deluge need not be all bad, and that in the old biblical story, the deluge ended with Noah’s Ark carrying people to safety, and with doves sent off the Ark carrying a promise and a hope of a better future. But this positive intention buried in the title of my presentation should not blind us to some negative spots or some defective moves and missteps in the revolution that is now taking place in Qatar and other Gulf countries in the field of education. Be that as it may, the other important word in my title, “observations,” i.e., not findings or facts or judgments or anything of the sort, but simple observations that I have been collecting from a distance on what is happening in the Gulf, based mainly on newspaper reports and on what appears on the Internet-are observations made from Beirut, without having recourse to the field and a chance to check and verify. Hence I will offer these observations sustained by the good intentions to which I referred, and by a wish that they be taken in the same spirit and accepted or rejected in whole or in part for whatever reasons may be.
