Establishing a national educational system must have been an extraordinarily daunting task for the young Prince Fahd. Literacy rates were low, except amongst the religious scholars. There were very few elementary schools for the general population, let alone secondary schools or universities. Only 35,000 schoolchildren were attending any kind of school at the time. There was no mechanism for a broadly based, educational syllabus. In other words, Prince Fahd, who was appointed the first Minister of Education in 1953 at a relatively young age, began with a clean slate.

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