Education for citizenship in the Arab World: key to the future

Reforming education to foster citizenship is urgently needed if democracy is to take hold in the Arab world. Under authoritarian rule, students were primarily taught to be docile subjects of the state—creative thinking was discouraged and information was treated as indisputable. Instead, students must learn from a very early age what it means to be citizens who seek and produce knowledge, question, and innovate. Only by teaching youth to think critically and respect different points of view will Arab countries become economically competitive and reliably democratic.