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The modern State of Kuwait lies at the northwestern end of the Persian Gulf, or the Arabian Gulf—as the Arabs prefer to call the body of water separating the Arabian Peninsula from Iran. In ancient times Iran was known as the Kingdom of Persia, from which the descriptor Persian came to be used in the West as the proper adjective for describing the Gulf. But to the Arabs, it is the Arabian G…
The Constitution of Kuwait, adopted on November 11, 1962, outlines the system of governance as a constitutional, democratic monarchy. As an emirate (analogous to a state or province), Kuwait has as its head the amir, who according to the constitution must be of the al-Sabah family descended from the late Mubarak al-Sabah. Islam is the state religion, and Shari'a (Islamic law) is the main so…
Since the oil boom that began in the 1950s the social changes in Kuwait have accelerated rapidly. Before the super affluence caused by oil, Kuwait was a poor sheikdom, economically and technologically undeveloped, a state with people eking out a living through fishing, pearling, herding, and trading. The developments of the 1950s and decades following attracted many Arabs from poorer countries of …
According to the Kuwait Information Office Education Statistics, in the 1997-1998 school year there were 144 male and female preschool-kindergarten schools, which provided a total of 1,387 classrooms. The total number of students (both male and female) attending pre-school-kindergarten was 42,226. The total number of pre-school-kindergarten teachers was 2,871. Of this number 2,720 were Kuwaiti and…
According to the Kuwait Information Office Education Statistics, in the 1997-1998 school year there were 79 male and 85 female middle schools, which provided 1,488 male and 1,453 female classrooms. The total number of male students attending middle school was 45,689. Of this student population 38,389 were Kuwaiti and 7,300 were non-Kuwaiti. The total number of middle school teachers for males was …
Kuwait University is the major institution of higher education with programs and courses of study in the arts and sciences, education, law, Shari'a, commerce and economics, engineering and petroleum, and medicine. The university was founded in 1966 with an enrollment of 418 (242 male, 176 female). In the early 1980s there were just over 10,000 students enrolled for study at the university, …
Kuwait belongs to the Arab GCC, founded in 1981, and whose other members include Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The objectives of the GCC call for "coordination, integration and unity between the member states in all fields." This cooperation occurs in economic and financial affairs, commerce, customs, communications, education, and culture among ot…
A 1998 article in the Economist entitled "High in the Gulf" described young Kuwaitis as a "drug dealer's delight: rich, westernized and bored." The problem of drug use in Kuwait has received increasing attention from public
officials who are responding through the initiation of a public education campaign. The government has a drug rehabilitation clinic op…
Some of the trends that characterize the teaching profession in Kuwait have already been mentioned based on the educational statistical data available for 1997-98, namely the tendency for Kuwaiti women to prefer educational vocations and the reliance on foreign teachers. Fewer Kuwaiti men are employed as teachers, and there are relatively small numbers of men enrolled in Kuwait University as educa…
The security of Kuwait in the twenty-first century has social dimensions of which education and other social services are important components. Oil revenues have enabled GCC states such as Kuwait to provide a range of social services, but with the accelerated development and modernization have come new challenges and alterations to longstanding sociocultural and religious traditions. Tangible decl…
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