Saudi Schools in the 1970s: Chalk, Crowds and Change

These pictures

Saudi Arabia, 1970s 🇸🇦 pic.twitter.com/Htt5UCrsSs

— MENA Visuals (@menavisualss) August 18, 2025

me back to my school days in Jeddah. The classrooms looked just like this—modest, yet alive with curiosity. Behind the blackboard and microscopes, however, lay a system still in its infancy. In 1970, there were fewer than 1,200 schools across the Kingdom; by the end of the decade, the number had more than doubled.

Teachers came largely from Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, reflecting the shortage of trained Saudi graduates. Their presence gave classrooms a distinctly pan-Arab character, as children in Jeddah or Riyadh were taught Arabic grammar by Syrians, and chemistry by Egyptians. Co-education did not exist: boys and girls attended separate schools, often in cramped buildings with few resources.

For girls, the 1970s marked an even more significant shift. Until the late 1950s, formal schooling for them was almost non-existent. King Faisal’s initiative to open schools for girls in 1960 met resistance from religious conservatives but gradually prevailed. By the time I was at school, thousands of girls were entering classrooms each year. To sit at a wooden desk, or to peer into a microscope in a rudimentary lab, was already a sign of how rapidly society was changing.

The conditions were austere. Textbooks were in short supply, teaching was rigid, and classrooms were overcrowded. Yet these shortcomings do not obscure the fact that education was beginning to alter the rhythm of daily life. Schools introduced discipline, exposed young Saudis to teachers from other Arab traditions, and created a new sense of possibility in a country then just beginning to urbanise.

Few of us imagined that the Kingdom would one day speak of space missions, artificial intelligence, or global universities. Yet, in retrospect, those modest classrooms helped make such ambitions less improbable. The act of learning itself—however limited the resources—was the first step towards broadening horizons.

Change, in Saudi Arabia as elsewhere, has rarely arrived in dramatic leaps. It often begins in the most ordinary settings: overcrowded classrooms, borrowed teachers, and lessons that seemed unremarkable at the time. But for those who lived through the 1970s, the memory of those classrooms remains a reminder of how futures are quietly seeded.

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