Lead:
The Grove leisure zone in Riyadh's Al-Rafia district has begun receiving visitors as part of Riyadh Season 2026, offering dining, live performances, and shopping experiences in an open-air setting with new international culinary and entertainment offerings. Across the Saudi press, columnists grappled with education policy, social hierarchies, technology ethics, and the visibility of labour behind online teaching.
Voices & Positions:
In Al-Jazirah, Dr. Sherif bin Muhammad Al-Atribi asks whether weak students are heard in education reform—arguing that while the Ministry of Education designs remedial programs and measures academic gaps, it rarely solicits input from the struggling students themselves about causes, obstacles, and workable solutions. He contends that measurement and analysis without student voice produces incomplete diagnoses.
In Al-Jazirah, Nujla Al-Otaibi writes that remote teaching demands invisible preparation and effort beyond screen time—teachers must sustain children's attention and participation through platforms in ways that in-person instruction, by contrast, permits through direct observation and gesture. She suggests early-grade distance learning may extract greater teacher labour than classroom instruction.
In Al-Jazirah, Dr. Abdulrahman bin Hussein Faqihi examines classism beyond wealth disparity, arguing it becomes pernicious when money, lineage, title, or neighbourhood address becomes the metric for human worth and access to respect and opportunity. He warns the danger lies in legitimising discrimination so thoroughly that deference to the powerful reads as social intelligence.
In Al-Jazirah, Fayez bin Salman Al-Hamdi argues women's dignity and rights do not depend on utility to others or male approval—not on agreement with male opinion, attribution of success to men, or measurable benefit to household. He calls for family members to nurture women's minds, celebrate achievements, listen to counsel, and preserve standing independent of economic value.
In Al-Jazirah, Sayyagh Al-Shammari critiques artificial intelligence's readiness to fabricate sources, events, and facts while presenting them with false confidence, risking that non-specialist users accept false outputs as fact. He identifies the core danger as unwarranted user trust in unvetted algorithmic speech.
Tension & Convergence:
The columnists converge on a critique of incomplete systems: education policy ignores student voice; remote platforms hide pedagogical labour; classism masks itself as naturalness; AI confidence masks ignorance. They share skepticism toward institutions (state, family, technology) that claim comprehensive solutions while excluding or silencing those they purport to serve or improve.
The sharpest divergence lies between Al-Atribi's call for listening and Al-Shammari's warning that listening to AI produces harm—one urges inclusion of human testimony, the other cautions against false machine testimony.
Editorial Takeaway:
The dominant voice today is one of suspicion toward unexamined systems: students, teachers, women, and users alike are harmed when their reality, effort, and knowledge are overlooked or overridden by institutional design, algorithmic confidence, or social custom.