We’re staying at the home of Dr. Faisal, a business administration professor who teaches at four different universities around the Badia. His wife, Umm Munther, is the principal of the primary school where we teach English.

Their son, Munther, is about to finish the thanawiya el-3amma, a year of intense study and memorization unlike anything we have in the States, that establishes one’s educational and career options for the rest of forever. You take just a few classes every week, with the expectation that the rest of the day will be spent at home, drilling and memorizing for two big tests at the end of the year. People who can afford it send their kids to cram schools, hire private tutors, plead, threaten, persuade, cajole, and bribe their kids to get this one thing right, because, for universities and employers, nothing else matters.

It’s a pretty dysfunctional system; I’m told that no matter what you accomplish later in life, if you bomb the thanawiya, you’re going to be essentially unemployable. Munther’s family esteems education very highly, and individual behavior reflects much more strongly on the family here than it does in the States, so it’s a time of high expectations.

Unfortunately, Munther is a young man after my own heart. He studies for maybe an hour a day, and then hangs out with his friends or watches TV. Putting myself in his position, it makes complete sense: he’s been told that his choices are (a) to have fun with his friends, bomb the thanawiya, and die poor and lonely; or (b) buckle down and do nothing else all year to qualify for the opportunity of four more years of rigorous schooling and testing, with the possibility (by no means assured) of a comfortable desk job in Amman when he’s finished.

If those were my options, I don’t think my efforts would be particularly inspired either. From our conversations I can tell that he’s inquisitive and bright; the feeling I get is that he has (sensibly) decided that the game is stupid, so he’s not going to play. I understand his family’s exasperation, trying so desperately to motivate him; but I don’t think they could have motivated me either.

I spoke to Dr. Faisal about the possibility of sending Munther to the LDS Business College to wipe the slate clean, like I did; and I learned something very interesting. Obviously if Munther can get into the Business College, he can go on to any university in the country, and his high school grades will be irrelevant. That means he can easily accomplish whatever he wants to—except work in the Middle East. He could earn a doctorate from a prestigious American school; but if he ever comes back here to work, the first thing any Middle-Eastern employer will check is his score on the thanawiya el-3amma.

You can see the problem: Munther’s situation cannot be all that uncommon. Surely there are thousands like him every year—bright, capable, independent thinkers who reject a no-win scenario here in the Middle East and head for the “land of opportunity”. This would not be so problematic, but when they finally make good, rather than welcoming them home to build their country with the skills they learned in the West, they are told that their youthful indiscretions are unforgivable. Go be a doctor or an engineer or a professor in America, because you’re not welcome here.

I’m not worried about Munther, and neither is Munther. He’ll find a way to succeed. What I am worried about is the country that will lose him forever when he leaves.