The attempts at transforming the Arab countries after the regained independence, did not result in any meaningful transformation of the lives of the people. The new government adopted strategies to realize the virtuous consumer society. In economic terms, it meant increasing cash crop production and resource depletion for sale to the developed societies, while the industrial process was to start with import substitution industries and eventually, go for heavy industrialization. In political terms, the governments were to ensure stability and lay the basis for democratic society. However, the notion of development in the Arab world became entirely characterized by that of alienation.
Education has a role in reducing that alienation.
Development as a condition of emancipation reinforced by other emancipatory conditions, must be an aim of Arab education, on one condition that it is understood as a continuous social transformation toward a total human emancipation. Without the development of creative potentials and value systems which correspond with the needs and possibilities of the Arab nation, the criteria of development, the criteria of goal-setting can only be imported from developed countries. If values and goals of the Arab nation represent only replicas of those existing in the developed countries, then the structure of power, the mode of life, the production of new values, in one word, everything will be just a replica of the existing reality in the developed countries. Cross-fertilizing them with its own cultural experiences, can contrive its own emancipatory future. To develop creativity, however, a society has to develop its own human resources.