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Opinion | Missiles Before Classrooms Israel today

2022-07-03T07:15:56.419Z


The power of the education system in Israel to produce thinkers and especially scientists, engineers, cyber people and more, thus ensuring that the quality gap between us and our enemies is maintained and even increased


In a rare public appearance at last week's annual cyber conference at Tel Aviv University, the deputy commander of Unit 8200, the elite unit of Israeli intelligence, chose to devote a significant portion of his remarks - along with a desirable engagement with Iran and its cyber attacks on Israel - to the unit's sources of success. In the world.

He attributed this success to the quality of Israeli youth enlisting in its ranks - personal quality, but also knowledge and skill that boys and girls acquired during their studies in the education system.

It is possible and even worth noting that this is a small minority of young people, mostly from the center of the country, who have received an excellent education that does not belong to other parts of Israeli society, and certainly to the residents of the periphery.

It is also possible and worthwhile to raise the question of whether this success story will continue in the future, in view of the growing difficulty of continuing to maintain a quality education system in the absence of resources and in the face of a shortage of teachers.

The power of the Israeli education system to produce thinkers and especially practitioners - scientists, engineers, cyber people and more, who will lead society and the state in Israel to a better future, thus ensuring that the quality gap between us and our enemies is maintained and even increased.

In the space around us, however, the picture is completely different.

The deep crisis - a political, social and especially economic crisis, in which most Arab countries and even Iran are located - is getting worse, and its damage to the education systems in these countries is particularly severe.

In recent decades, the population in the Middle East has grown at an accelerated rate, from about 100 million people in 1960, to about 400 million in 2010, and by 2050 it is expected to reach 750 million.

But the countries in the region are finding it difficult to keep up and meet the needs of the population, and the result is a shortage and distress, rising unemployment and damage to the health, welfare and education services that the countries provide to their citizens.

To the plethora of these problems has been added in the last decade the Arab Spring, which has proven to be particularly destructive for the people of the Middle East.

In many countries civil wars broke out, leaving behind destruction and devastation.

In Syria, for example, which even before the war was not known as a power of education, about two-thirds of schools and classrooms were destroyed, and millions of children stopped studying.

Even today, after a truce has been reached, the Syrian regime has no resources or desire to invest itself in the rehabilitation of education and training systems, as it gives priority to the restoration of its military power, but in doing so it condemns the future generation of Syrian children to ignorance.

In other countries, the Arab Spring has led to the strengthening of authoritarian regimes and more often than not of Islamic forces stifling free thinking, criticism and discovery of initiative, necessary to raise a thinking and containing young generation.

Under the pressure of clerics, priority is often given to the study of Koranic verses and halakhic rulings at the expense of formulas in mathematics or the study of English.

Equally serious is the phenomenon of the abandonment of educated young people, who are voting on foot and migrating en masse to Western countries after losing hope for a better future in their homeland. 

The data therefore show that many children, and certainly girls, have no access to education at all, and in any case the quality of instruction received by the lucky ones in them is poor - in the absence of the rulers' ability and desire to invest in education.

From tens and hundreds of millions of inhabitants it is still possible to produce an educated elite, even if limited.

And for evidence, Iran has brought out scientists who brought it to the nucleus.

But here, too, it is a negligible minority whose contribution is felt in missile and nuclear production and cyber attacks, while the rest of the country's life systems are failing and collapsing.

Education is therefore one of the areas in which Israel must not integrate into the space around it.

Instead, it deserves to work to strengthen its education system, on which its future depends and only that it will ensure the preservation and expansion of the qualitative gap between it and its enemies.

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Source: israelhayom

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