The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) considers education a top priority, and more emphasis has been placed on this following the 2016 announcement of Saudi Vision 2030. Since then, the country has witnessed several economic and social changes. As a result, the Kingdom has initiated a plan to invest in human capital through education to diversify its…

Formal education was used by the apartheid government to prepare black South Africans for manual labour, thus there was little curricular focus on the development of higher-order cognitive skills. With the abolition of apartheid in 1994, the education system was re-valued and re-evaluated to provide wider access to quality education; the focus of…

Primary education in Russia has failed to adapt to the needs of post-Soviet society, and is still based on rote learning and memorization instead of learning through discovery and learning to use and apply what is learned.

This paper explores the question of whether critical thinking can eventually become part of the cultural fabric in Kazakhstan, a country whose Soviet educational system not only trained teachers to memorise, lecture and intimidate students but also created a culture in educational institutions fraught with many fear-based behaviours engendering…

This article discusses a case for teaching a kind of knowledge that is not in textbooks. The author calls on education leaders to take a crucial step toward getting students to use higher-order thinking skills by drawing a sharp line between firsthand and secondhand knowledge. The best way to do this is to focus attention directly on some part of…

The Pahlavi Dynasty (1941-1979) was crucial in the modernization of Iranian history, particularly its higher education. However, the goal of education was "an aristocracy of culture", producing small numbers of technocrats, but not nurturing thoughtful and critical individuals. Rote learning was dominant, and the curriculum was imposed…