Chapter 19: Endless Education Reform: The Case of Kuwait

Education reform has increasingly become a top political priority in most countries, as education is thought to be the solution to social and economic challenges. While some of these reforms were successful, others had no impact at all and ended in failure. In the past two decades, Kuwait has continuously attempted to reform its education system, aiming to shift its economy toward a knowledge-based economy by improving the skill sets of its human capital. However, these attempts ended with failure. The aim of this chapter is to provide an explanation of the causes behind the failures by documenting and analyzing the recent reform project, which was launched in 2010 in collaboration with the World Bank. Due to the Ministry of Education’s (MOE’s) lack of official documentation related to the reform process the ethnography approach was used to develop critical documentation of reform process. The ability of educational institutions, including the MOE, to lead and manage educational reform is a crucial factor that affected the sustainability and success of the reform. Consequently, the success of any reform requires the government to prioritize top policies, implements certain social changes, and ensures skilled human capital is incorporated into the educational institutions.