At a press conference last month chaired by Qatar’s prime minister, Qatar Holding LLC announced that it had bought Harrods, the iconic department store in the heart of London.

The purchase was viewed as a great source of pride by Qatari officials, as if it were the Louisiana Purchase. The price tag for the transaction was equivalent to $2.2 billion. For Qatar, acquiring Harrods added to the emirate’s highly visible portfolio of investments, ranging from the Canary Wharf banking district in London, to Volkswagen, to the London Stock Exchange. It also fit in with Qatar’s investment philosophy, which is to link itself with well-known investments in Europe and North America.

However, the opportunity cost of this acquisition was relatively high. If Qatar had chosen to invest the $2.2 billion in the Arab world, where it is sorely needed, it would have pursued the right strategy both morally and financially. The Arab world is performing dismally on the economic front. Unemployment is high and underemployment is nurturing the conditions that allow extremism to flourish.

It is also no mystery that the Arab world needs some serious infusion of capital that might enable Arab youths to integrate into the fast-growing global economy. Investing in Harrods is exotic and will create publicity, but it will not otherwise help meet these objectives.

Even if the Harrods investment is justified on financial grounds (and many market experts beg to differ), it will create no jobs or economic incentives in the Arab world, or for that matter in Qatar.

Yet Qatar has serious domestic problems when it comes to educating its own youth. Despite the fact that the emirate is one of the world’s richest countries, it has among the poorest test scores in the world. For instance, in the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, an international test of math and science skill for 8th graders, Qatar scored dead last among the 48 countries that took the test. This placed it below the Palestinian Authority, Botswana, El Salvador and Saudi Arabia. Qatar’s average score was about the same as the average score for Ghana.

Additionally, Qatar has no students scoring at the advanced international level in mathematics. At the 4th-grade level, Yemen was the only country to score lower than Qatar.

This is not promising news for a nation trying to portray itself as an incubator of education. During the last decade, Qatar has invested in institutions of higher education such as Cornell University, Georgetown University, and Texas A&M University, among others. Once again, the substantial injections have benefited those institutions more than they have Qatar or the Middle East.

The poor international test results of the Qatari students (as well as others in the Arab world) are a serious issue that requires immediate attention. The Qatari government has been investing generously in the hardware. What it genuinely needs now is the software. All the fancy schools will not yield favorable results until reform is embraced. Overhauling the educational system to allow the training and hiring of qualified teachers would be a step in the right direction. Reforming and embracing a curriculum where math and science are the core of the educational experience is also needed. Teaching kids how to think and not what to think is the essence of critical thinking.

Like many rich Arab countries, Qatar should concern itself above all with its own neighborhood and utilize the vast income at its disposal to assist in developing the Arab world. Harrods may be more striking and trendy than investing in Egypt, Lebanon or Jordan; yet an investment in any of those countries is an investment in regional stability. Such investments are waiting to be found.

Perhaps Qatar should look at the playbook of Warren Buffet, the legendary investor who identifies opportunities in the most unimaginable places. I doubt Harrods was on Buffet’s radar screen.

The problem in Qatar or elsewhere in the Gulf is not the lack of expenditure on education; it is the lack of smart investment in primary and secondary education. Unless serious change is adopted, future generations of Qataris may find themselves unqualified to work even at the department store now owned by their ruling family.

Raja Kamal is a senior associate dean at the Harris School for Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.