At a time when countries around the world are racing to redefine education as a space for freedom, innovation, and academic independence, the project to amend the education and human resource development law in Jordan seeks to reproduce a centralized administrative model that the world has surpassed decades ago. Instead of aligning with the spirit of global educational reform, the project aligns with a mindset of control and strict regulation, treating education as a danger that must be controlled rather than a national resource that should be liberated.
Globally, advanced educational systems no longer believe that education should be managed from closed offices or based on directives issued from the top of the administrative hierarchy. The most successful international experiences, from Finland to Canada, have been built on reducing the executive authority's interference in the specifics of the educational process, and granting schools, universities, and teachers a broad scope for decision-making, innovation, and experimentation. On the other hand, the Jordanian bill goes completely in the opposite direction, inundating the educational system with a series of broad powers and open-ended instructions that leave the future of education at the mercy of administrative will, rather than an educational vision.
What is even more dangerous is that the project weakens the principle of academic independence, which international charters agree is a fundamental condition for the quality of education. Universities around the world are not judged today merely by their student numbers, but by their ability to produce knowledge freely, and their independence from political and administrative interventions. When curricula, programs, and even academic decisions are subject to the whim of executive directives, the international reputation of Jordanian education is at stake, and its ability to compete and engage internationally becomes limited and shaky.
Also, from a global perspective, the project reveals a clear bias for market logic at the expense of the humanitarian mission of education. While linking education to the job market has become necessary, international experiences caution against turning education into merely a factory for fast skills. Countries that have reduced education to its economic dimension alone have paid a steep price, characterized by a decline in critical thinking, weak civic awareness, and increased social fragility. Education, in its essence, is not a deferred employment contract, but a process of building a human being and a citizen.
The project, in its current context, also threatens to deepen the educational gap, one of the most serious issues combated by international organizations today. Uncontrolled expansion in private education and special programs, combined with weak real guarantees for equal opportunities, opens the door to a class-based educational system, where the affluent receive quality education, while public education is left to face its crises alone. This model has failed globally, leaving societies educationally and socially divided.
The position of the teacher in this equation cannot be ignored. In countries that have achieved real educational leaps, the teacher has been at the center of the decision, not on the margins. In the law project, however, the teacher appears as an employee subject to more surveillance than a partner in reform. This is starkly contrary to the global trend, which sees any educational reform as starting with empowering the teacher, not restricting him.
The most dangerous aspect of the law project is not any specific article, but the philosophy governing it. A philosophy that sees education as an administrative file not a national project, the school as an execution institution not an ideas lab, and the student as a number not a human capable of thinking and differing. Thus, continuing in this direction not only means stumbling in reform but also means isolating Jordanian education from the global path and pushing it to the margins of international competition.
Education cannot be fixed by laws alone, but by vision. If this project is not reconsidered to align with the spirit of the era and the global principles of academic freedom and educational justice, we are not faced with a law of reform, but with a document that legalizes the crisis and grants it a legislative cover.
