With more and more of their young people heading abroad for an international higher education experience, the rulers of Saudi Arabia have decreed that a little more cultural orientation is now in order for their best and brightest.
This year, for the first time, participants in Saudi Arabia's elite King Abdullah Scholarship Program underwent an intensive course on how to best behave in their host nations.
<a href="http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=106124&d=27&m=1&y=2008&pi"
x=kingdom.jpg&category=Kingdom">According to Arab News, 3,240 new students were required to attend workshops offering tips and insights into their destination countries. These include Britain in particular, but also Australia, Canada, India, Malaysia, <a href="http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=106624&d=9&m=2&y=2008&pix"
=kingdom.jpg&category=Kingdom">New Zealand and, far less so these days, alas, the United States.
"Students going to study abroad, especially in the UK, have to try hard to adapt not only to the environment of the countries, but to adjust to meet the high standards of the universities they are going to," explained course convenor Abdullah Al-Nasser.
Tactfully, perhaps, no mention was made of whether students were offered tips on dealing with non-Muslims, presumably a relevant subject in one of the world's most austerely Islamic lands.
The intermingling of the sexes - always a sensitive issue in a country where women are not permitted to drive, appear before a judge without a male representative or travel without a male guardian's permission - was dealt with by participants discussing the limits of interacting with the opposite sex, as well as being warned against marrying non-Saudis, and especially non-Arabs.
The article noted, without elaboration, that some 20 students who married abroad last year had to cut short their scholarships and return to the kingdom.
And woe betide anyone who cut short their orientation programme, too. As part of the course, students were required to log in and log out of sessions using special cards provided with barcodes, with their timings forwarded on to the Ministry of Education. Those found not to have attended at least 30% of the programme could kiss their 2008 scholarships goodbye.
Still, if the $15bn that was spent over the past year on new higher education projects within Saudi Arabia is anything to go by, it's not as if these students will be left academically high and dry. And that's one point of cultural difference that government education-planners in the cash-strapped west could learn a thing or two about from the desert kingdom.
