Education and Technological Capability Building in the Gulf

Technology concerns knowledge not merely artifacts. To transfer it effectively requires prepared minds on the part of the receivers and some measure of shared cognitive frameworks. It also requires co-ordinated policies on investment, education and training, employment, the economy and development. In the Gulf, specifically the UAE, educational administration and schooling are not well adapted to these purposes. Transfer of educational technology is needed, yet education is culture-saturated and the educational bureaucracy is not well developed. Higher cognitive processes are techniques for handling reality and are thus themselves a technology. Transferring these may be the most important transfer of all.