Refleksi: Lapangan pendidikan apa yang bisa ditawarkan Indonesia kepada Arab Saudi selain yang dihebohkan di Cianjur etc?
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=86017&d=10&m=8&y=2006&pix=kingdom.jpg&category=Kingdom Thursday, 10, August, 2006 (16, Rajab, 1427) Saudi-Singapore Education Ties to Get Massive Boost Hasan Hatrash, Arab News SINGAPORE, 10 August 2006 - Later this year, Saudi Education Ministry officials are planning to travel to Singapore to bolster educational ties between the two countries. "We want to build a relationship at the school level, where we can establish a link for student exchanges, faculty collaboration and, over time, more joint programs," Singapore's Minister of Education Tharman Shanmugaratnam said recently to a group of journalists who were invited to Singapore as part of a program of inter-governmental relations. The Singaporean officials announced that they had extended an invitation to their Saudi counterparts to develop stronger educational ties. Shanmugaratnam had visited the Kingdom earlier this year as part of the Singapore delegation headed by Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew. The trip in part helped bring a group of Saudi students of both genders to Singapore to meet Asian youth leaders last month. "I found my counterparts were as keen as I was and it is amazing how quickly we arranged it," said Shanmugaratnam. "In a matter of weeks the two schools were chosen and students were selected." Attending the seminar were students from Saudi Arabia, China, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia. Shanmugaratnam added that the seminar played a vital role in developing an understanding between different cultures. "I spent an hour chatting with the students especially those from Saudi Arabia and they were happy to be here, totally comfortable, but it just struck me that the students I was talking to from all these different countries were more or less the same. They have their own interests, their own sense of individuality and they were remarkably similar," he said. Singapore authorities are keen to boost the number of Middle Eastern students in Singapore's government-funded and privately run educational system. "We are eager to see how more Saudi students can be placed in our universities, because there is a whole range of offerings in Singapore, where students can study in an Asian English-speaking country with a high standard of education," he said. Singapore enjoys a much lower dropout rate than other countries in the region because, says Shanmugaratnam, the education system there provides different routes of progression within the main education system. Part of the success has come with a program that starts students on a career track at an early age. "Singapore has created these pathways of education for students at the age of 13, to keep our school dropout rate as low as possible, but this method is found to be politically incorrect in some Western countries because they don't like to stream their students too early," he said. Shanmugaratnam cites New York City's dropout rate of slightly over 50 percent, while Singapore's dropout rate is about 2.6 percent. He said that Singapore is now starting a new school for those who fail their primary school examinations repeatedly in an attempt to further bring down the dropout rate. "We want to do something even more radical for them, which is to provide them with a new school that would focus intensively on applied education and on character development," he said. "Fortunately, we have been able to achieve fairly high standards in education." [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] *************************************************************************** Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. Menuju Indonesia yg Lebih Baik, in Commonality & Shared Destiny. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia *************************************************************************** __________________________________________________________________________ Mohon Perhatian: 1. Harap tdk. memposting/reply yg menyinggung SARA (kecuali sbg otokritik) 2. Pesan yg akan direply harap dihapus, kecuali yg akan dikomentari. 3. Reading only, http://dear.to/ppi 4. Satu email perhari: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 5. No-email/web only: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 6. kembali menerima email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
