Abdulla N. Khoory Questions Who Defines Success in the Gulf’s $33.6 Billion Education Market

Gulf states have built one of the world's largest private education markets, yet the benchmarks that define success inside it are written elsewhere. A June 2026 policy brief from Dubai's Fiker Institute argues that the arrangement carries consequences well beyond the classroom, shaping how the region is perceived abroad and whether its graduates can think within their own intellectual tradition. Its author, Abdulla N. Khoory, an IEmirati investor and entrepreneur, treats curriculum as an instrument of soft power and poses one question: will the Gulf remain a consumer of imported education, or will it design a model rooted in its own language, culture, and civilizational history?

"What we choose to measure in our classrooms is a declaration of what we value as a society," Khoory writes. "Reassessing those metrics is the first and most essential act of educational sovereignty."

A Market Anchored to Imported Benchmarks

Dubai illustrates the scale of the dependence. Figures from the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, announced through Dubai's Media Office, show private school enrolment in the emirate grew 6 percent during the 2024-25 academic year, reaching 387,441 students across 227 schools offering 17 different curricula. West Asia now hosts nearly 2,000 international schools serving roughly 1.75 million students.

Money follows the same path. Abdulla N. Khoory cites estimates valuing the GCC's private K–12 education market at 33.6 billion dollars in 2025, with projections exceeding 65 billion dollars by 2031. Billions flow each year through curricular systems whose content, assessment frameworks, and definitions of excellence are determined outside the region.

His argument is historical as well as economic. Before modern state schooling, Gulf merchant families sent children abroad to British-administered Egypt, Kuwait, and India, absorbing colonial examination systems and English-language instruction. What began as a practical response to limited local infrastructure hardened into a structural norm.

What Do Falling Reading Scores Signal?

Reading performance gives the brief its urgency. Results from the OECD's PISA 2022 assessment recorded the steepest decline in reading among 15-year-olds since testing began in 2000, and Gulf scores sit well below the OECD average of 476. Students in the UAE scored 417, Qatar scored 419, and Saudi Arabia scored 383, with the Saudi figure down almost 17 points from 2018.

Only 53 percent of students in Qatar reached minimum reading proficiency, compared with 74 percent across OECD countries.

Abdulla N. Khoory traces the problem to years before school begins. Neuroscience research indicates roughly 90 percent of a child's brain architecture forms by age five, yet many Gulf children get limited exposure to Modern Standard Arabic before formal education, since the formal register differs sharply from the dialects spoken at home. Weak early literacy in formal Arabic, he argues, narrows access to classical scholarship, historical consciousness, and moral vocabulary.

"A society that does not read deeply in its own language cannot think independently within its own intellectual tradition," he writes.

AI and the Outsourcing of Thought

Artificial intelligence sharpens each of these concerns. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that 39 percent of workers' core skills will change by 2030, with AI literacy among the fastest-rising demands. Khoory's worry runs deeper than employment: AI systems encode the worldview of their training data, and Stanford's AI Index research has documented models that were trained to be explicitly unbiased yet continue to demonstrate implicit bias.

"Whoever trains the models shapes the narrative, and data sovereignty is intellectual sovereignty," he writes.

Governments have started to respond. Abdulla N. Khoory credits the UAE's National AI Strategy 2031 and Saudi Arabia's SDAIA initiatives as signals of commitment to AI governance, but he wants those strategies extended explicitly into education, with large language models trained on national archives, jurisprudence, literature, and regional scholarship. "When designed locally, AI stops being someone else's voice in our classrooms and starts becoming our own," he writes.

Students who ask chatbots to summarize, analyze, and conclude on their behalf are doing more than saving time, the brief warns. They are outsourcing the thinking process itself to systems trained on data they did not produce, reflecting values they did not choose.

Where Abdulla N. Khoory Says Gulf Education Should Evolve

Rather than abandoning international examinations, the brief proposes regionally designed assessments rigorous enough to sit alongside them. Singapore offers the working precedent: internationally recognized qualifications co-developed with the University of Cambridge that still embed national priorities such as bilingualism, cultural identity, and holistic student development.

A broader definition of intelligence underpins the proposal. Khoory draws on Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, which identifies eight distinct cognitive capacities, then observes that most Gulf education systems measure only two or three of them. Schools could also reduce standardized testing in early and middle years, he suggests, since high-pressure examinations stunt the curiosity that produces durable learning.

Four further recommendations complete the agenda. Gulf states should reform teacher training so educators are rooted in the culture and language the curriculum seeks to preserve, build permanent national research institutions modeled on Finland's National Agency for Education, train AI systems on the Gulf's own histories, and invest in an Arabic knowledge commons spanning media, film, animation, and digital content.

Precedents exist far from the region. New Zealand integrated the Māori knowledge system, mātauranga Māori, into national curricula, and Alaska maintains standards for culturally responsive schools. Khoory cites both as evidence that indigenous knowledge and global academic rigor can coexist.

Local material is abundant, he argues. Gulf education before formal schooling ran on oral poetry, genealogy, and majlis-style circles that reduced hierarchy and encouraged collective inquiry, traditions documented by scholars such as Marcel Kurpershoek and Saad Sowayan. Experiential modules built around falconry, weaving, and environmental stewardship would express regional values rather than decorate the timetable.

A Confident Engagement, Not a Retreat

His closing argument reads as an audit of everyday choices. Parents should ask what they are celebrating when a child gains admission abroad. Employers should ask whether screening by institutional prestige reinforces imported standards of excellence. Policymakers should ask whether benchmarking exclusively against OECD metrics has made the region's own priorities invisible.

Abdulla N. Khoory holds a Master's in Education from Harvard University and a Bachelor's in International Affairs from Northeastern University, and advises on philanthropy, education, and international development from Dubai. His brief ends without triumphalism: "The path toward educational sovereignty is not a retreat from the world but a more confident engagement with it, grounded in language, heritage, and the conviction that the Gulf's intellectual traditions are strong foundations upon which to build."