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Gender Segregated Education In Ksa

Abstract
This article examines the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's gender-segregated higher education system and how it is used to transmit the Kingdom's traditional societal expectations to the employment sector. With Saudi Arabia's current need for economic change, the education system is retarding instead of accelerating reform. A background consisting of Saudi Arabian history, governing laws, religious beliefs and women's roles is examined. I then discuss the education system's preservation goal by considering segregation, women's mobility, videoconferencing courses, and the roles of professors. I attempt to explain how the current education system fails to prepare its students for the global economy: by limiting women's access to the labor market, and by not preparing men for the realities of the global market and therefore creating the need for migrant workers. In conclusion, conserving culture is significant, but for economic change to occur, the extent of cultural conservatism and its effect on the education system need to be re-evaluated.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a monarchy, headed by the Al Saud royal family, with a council of ministers. Saudi Arabia's strong roots in religious and tribal histories date back to the eighteenth century with the joining of the first Ibn Saud to Muhammad ben Abdel Wahab. Ibn Saud was the ruler of the town of Dariya in Najd (AlMunajjed, 1997). Muhammad ben Abdel Wahab was a religious fundamentalist reformer who changed the worship and social practices of Sunni Islam. He was viewed as a Mujaddid, a voice that is sent by God at the on-set of every century to remind Muslims to return to the true revelations of the Qur'an. Together, these two formed the religious movement called Wahabi (Cordesman, 2003)—also known as Salafi in the Arab world (Del Castillo, 2003)—which Saudi Arabia follows today. These two were unhappy with the decline of social virtues in the eighteenth century and wanted to bring back the ‘Golden Age of Islam,'...