Khaberni - Azm Party Center for Strategic Studies
In every nation, there is a silent moment more dangerous than any war fought with weapons, the moment of accepting ignorance as a collective fate. When the light is turned off in the minds, we do not need external forces to threaten us, as extinguished minds are sufficient to create a threat to themselves. The danger starts here, not from an external enemy, but from our internal minds that have eroded the ability to question.
Today, as knowledge accelerates like light waves, the Arab world stands before a troubling and dangerous phenomenon— the manufacture of ignorance. It seems even more tragic when it is deliberately created, transforming into an unannounced policy that penetrates the details of education, media, and public discourse.
Ignorance is no longer just an absence of knowledge but has become a comprehensive system that maintains stagnation, prevents questions, and reproduces intellectual and social dependency.
In the Middle East, the policy of ignorance is used as a soft political tool to keep the population in a state of dependency and helplessness against critical thinking. Once awareness fades, it becomes easy to push through decisions, nationalism is reduced to slogans, and citizens are subjected to a culture of fear rather than a culture of questioning.
In Jordan, as in many Arab states, the crisis of ignorance no longer stems from a lack of resources or expertise, but rather from the absence of a national cultural project capable of directing education towards building humans, not merely preparing employees. When schools are reduced to exams, universities to degrees, and knowledge to jobs, ignorance becomes an institutional state wrapped in slogans.
This system has spawned what can be called disguised ignorance policies, which empty education of its critical content, encourage rote learning instead of creativity, and trap the mind between loyalty and fear. Instead of universities being arenas for discourse and enlightenment, they often become battlegrounds for various conflicts where debates are managed with a mentality of dominance rather than one of ideas. From here, the dangerous relationship between the policy of ignorance and university violence emerges, consciousness fades, unifying values decline, and social ties disintegrate for the sake of narrow affiliations that weaken both state and society together.
This is not a coincidence nor a temporary regression, but rather the result of systematic policies, silent complicity, and a long accumulation of neglect and marginalization, until knowledge became a luxury, and ignorance an unspoken power.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, French philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "When knowledge is reduced to paper certificates, education becomes a means of control rather than liberation." This is exactly what we are experiencing today, where education has transformed from a means of social rise to a tool for reproducing dependency and compliance, not free thinking and creativity.
In Jordan, evidence abounds that ignorance is no longer just a social condition, but has become a soft production system disguised behind educational, religious, and media slogans. We teach our children to read without teaching them to think, we praise innovators then surround them with silence, and we raise the banner of reform while fearing the very first step towards it. Until the scope of ignorance widened so much that it became almost an institutional structure. Thus, nations are forged that know everything but themselves, talk a lot but do not listen to their own minds.
From rigid curricula that do not keep up with the times, to universities that repeat the same thoughts and methods, to a lack of critical thinking, the absence of a scientific research culture, and a decline in the status of teachers and universities together, we’ve reached what resembles a closed loop: education without thought, students without prospects, and a country paying the price from its future.
Here, ignorance does not mean the absence of reading and writing, but the absence of the ability to discern, to think independently, to pose bold questions that build nations, and as the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci said, "political ignorance is more dangerous than illiteracy, because it produces a citizen susceptible to manipulation."
Stopping the manufacture of ignorance requires first acknowledging that it indeed exists, and that it finds in some educational and media institutions, and religious bodies, both its direct and indirect tools. The repetitive curricula that kill the spirit of creativity, the media discourse that settles for the superficial, and the political language that plants fear instead of hope, are all components of modern ignorance
production.
Perhaps the greatest danger lies in normalizing ignorance, making it acceptable or even desirable, when indifference is rewarded and critical thinking marginalized, and when a questioning student becomes annoying, a dissenting intellectual seen as threatening, and an innovative teacher is hemmed in by bureaucratic restrictions, then we are facing a system that reproduces itself without sensing the danger it creates.
Those behind the policy of ignorance are those who see in ignorance a guarantee of the continuation of their influence. Conscious societies hold accountable, educated ones demand, and enlightened ones change. Therefore, sometimes general and university education is weakened, institutions are flooded with unconsidered decisions, and academics are occupied with details rather than ideas.
Ignorance is not just a flaw in the system, but a result of a hidden will that keeps the citizen at a specific level of consciousness, one that does not threaten the existing structure of interests.
The bearers of responsibility for this scene are not individuals, but governments, boards of education and higher education, accreditation bodies, security councils, and successive university presidents. Where all of them have, in many cases, become part of the problem, not the solution. Universities have turned into arenas for quota sharing and position distribution, not for the production of thought and knowledge. Meanwhile, the Accreditation Authority, which is supposed to be the guardian of quality, has sometimes been preoccupied with numbers and paper models more than the essence of academic output quality control, and perhaps the reason is a flaw in the law that grants the head of the authority the right to a quality member in the education council, thereby becoming part of the legislation, rather than being entirely a supervisory body, thus turning quality control, over time, into a bureaucratic barrier that prevents excellence rather than preserving it.
All successive governments and various councils have harmonized, until they formed a complete system where political interests intermingled with academic and bureaucratic interests.
In the absence of a true national vision, which led to the appointment of some academic leadership that lacks competence or intellectual courage, while those with vision and daring are sidelined and those bold enough to critique or innovate are excluded. Thus, political and academic leadership that is not competent settled in their positions, they manage but do not lead, they execute but do not think, expanding the gap of regression and stifling universities and institutions from within.
As a result, we see degrees without skills, a decline in outputs, and the spread of university violence as one of the manifestations of value collapse, and a decline in rankings, all reflecting a tragic image of where education has arrived, devoid of value and thought.
Many of us ask, why have we failed? We failed because we did not understand that education is not a ministerial project, but a national civilizational project of long-term essence. Every strategy born separate from a comprehensive vision, is buried after changing a minister or government. Curricula are written with an administrative mind, not an educational thought, and reform projects are measured by budgets, not by impact. Even scientific research, which is supposed to be the nation's brain, has become, in many cases, a means for promotion rather than for creativity, as the phenomenon of buying research or plagiarizing it spread, and academic integrity disappeared, and university theses are written to fill shelves, not to build a nation.
Countries like Singapore, Finland, and South Korea have succeeded when they made education a national project led by the best minds, not by politicians or bureaucrats, transforming their schools and universities into factories for thought, not offices for issuing degrees.
Therefore, Azm Party, reaffirms what was stated in the directives of His Majesty King Abdullah II when he said, "Jordan cannot achieve its future vision without quality education that keeps up with global developments." For the king, education is not an administrative sector, but a battle of awareness for building the Jordanian human capable of leading the future.
Escaping the circle of the manufacture of ignorance in Jordan is not accomplished with slogans, but by starting a comprehensive national project for enlightenment, placing education and knowledge at the heart of public policies, not on its margins. Jordan, which has presented brilliant minds to the world in medicine, engineering, and science, should not leave education hostage to systematic regression and politicization, and let indifference dominate the spirit of the new generation. Enlightenment is not an intellectual luxury, but a long-term national security.
Therefore, Azm Party believes that stopping the manufacture of ignorance first requires acknowledging its existence, and secondly, dismantling the structure that nourishes it. We need to rebuild the concept of education from the ground up, to become a state project, not a government project, universities are granted their true independence, and there should be a reconsideration in the mechanisms for appointing their presidents and trustee councils based on competence not loyalty, and it is necessary to open the windows of academic freedom, because the mind cannot create under restraint, nor can it produce while fearful.
When we move from justifying ignorance to questioning it, and from fearing awareness to investing in it, Jordan can transform from a country that consumes knowledge to one that produces it, and from a society that faces crises emotionally to one that forms solutions rationally. Only then do we move from the manufacture of ignorance to enlightenment.
As the party sees it, the manufacture of enlightenment is not complete unless it becomes a national and cultural project that retrieves the mind from the clutches of superstition and intellectual laziness. Enlightenment does not mean merely stuffing minds with information, but building a critical awareness capable of questioning, reviewing, and distinguishing between truth and propaganda, and between public interest and individual or factional tendencies. The societies that succeeded in overcoming their educational crises did not do so through top-down decisions but through an alliance between the school, media, university, and intellectuals, to forge a new environment that values knowledge and grants it social and economic value.
On the other hand, enlightenment cannot be manufactured in a political or cultural vacuum, but requires the will of a state that sees the human as real capital, and believes that freedom of thought does not threaten security, but protects it. From here begins the battle for awareness, with media that enlightens not misleads, and with religious and public discourse that restores human dignity as the goal of development, not its means. Only thus can nations transform from producing ignorance to exporting light, and from a culture of justification to a culture of questioning.
The manufacture of enlightenment starts from the school, university, media, mosque, and cultural platform, and is based on establishing the values of thinking, openness, and responsibility. A society that reconciles with knowledge does not fear the question, does not fear disagreement, and does not exclude the different. Here, the role of the state comes in making the university a beacon for the free mind, not a refuge for narrow loyalties. The teacher and the intellectual must be restored as pillars in the project, not as victims in the battle of marginalization and bureaucracy.
Azm Party proposes a clear vision for exiting this vicious cycle, based on liberating education from bureaucracy, linking it to national development, developing curricula that serve critical thinking rather than rote learning, empowering universities to choose their leadership based on competence and achievement, enhancing applied scientific research aimed at solving community problems, building partnerships between education and the job market to reduce unemployment among graduates, and restoring consideration for the teacher and academic as national forces in building humans. It is necessary to involve civil society, parties, and thinkers in formulating a national vision for education that does not change with government changes.
The time has come to break the cycle of ignorance and restore consideration for the Jordanian mind. Peoples do not rise by chance, but when they choose to learn to be free, not to adapt. We are in dire need of a quiet but deep and comprehensive intellectual revolution, starting from the classrooms and ending in the decision-making rooms, passing through academic leaders who possess courage not offices, and to institutions that protect thought not besiege it.
If we realize that ignorance is a manufacture, we must understand that awareness is resistance, and if some build ignorance like a wall, we must turn it into a bridge towards a national renaissance, titled "Jordan's Comprehensive Renaissance with Science and Action, Not Slogans", and this is the philosophy fully embraced by Azm Party.
