Doaa El-Bey looks into the ordeal of the thanaweya amma in Egypt and that of the formation of the government in Iraq Students of the thanaweya amma, or secondary school certificate, got their results this week. This is the end of an ordeal and the start of another -- applying for a suitable college. The front pages followed the results and the aftermath. Al-Ahram 's banner on Sunday read, '50.5 per cent is the rate of success'. Al-Wafd on Sunday wrote, 'Worst result for thanaweya amma '. Nahdet Masr on Monday had, '109,000 fail'. Al-Akhbar on Monday blared, 'Student grievances start today', and Al-Masry Al-Yom wrote, 'Girls better than boys'. The editorial of the official daily Al-Ahram said that thanaweya amma has been the most complex part in Egyptian education for years because it represents the bottleneck for joining a university and drawing up the future of every student. The editorial listed a few factors that led to such a result: the exams assess the students' ability to memorise rather than understand, and the consecutive ministers who wanted to be popular were keen to give directives that the exams should be easy for the average student. As a result, students achieve very high results that sometimes exceeded 100 per cent; meanwhile, the requirements for acceptance in top colleges became higher. Thus it became normal that a student who got 95 per cent in thanaweya amma could not join the college he or she wanted, the edit explained. It hailed the effort of the Ministry of Education to make use of the vacancy year this year -- in which students sitting for the exams were those who failed last year -- to try to reform education. However, that should be followed by other steps as we are in dire need to develop the curricula and transform thanaweya amma into a normal certificate that provides a chance for completing education in various ways. "Developing education is the genuine future of this country," the edit concluded. Mohamed Amin wondered whether choosing the top students in thanaweya amma is a political decision. He asked in the daily Al-Wafd, the mouthpiece of the opposition Wafd Party, whether there are political motivations in selecting the top students. Did Minister of Education Ahmed Zaki Badr consider geographical distribution when he chose these students? Did he consider the general trend in public opinion when naming these students or did he deal with the results in an abstract way? If Badr is issuing politically motivated decisions, this is a catastrophe, but if his decision regarding the top thanaweya amma students is politically motivated this is an even bigger catastrophe. A quick reading of this year's results, Amin added, would show that unlike previous years the top students are from governorates other than Cairo and Alexandria. He asked why not one single top student was from Cairo and Alexandria. Is it to show Badr's dissatisfaction with the schools in Cairo or to show that school overcrowdedness had an impact on students from Cairo? Amin did not rule out that demonstrations would be launched in Cairo and Alexandria against Badr for excluding both governorates from the list of governorates that produce top students. The deadly shooting that took place at Abul-Nomros and left six employees dead and six injured at the hands of their company colleague shocked the public and shed light on the spiralling violence in society. Gamal Hussein, who was overwhelmed with horror and fear, described the assault as heinous on all levels. He wrote in the official daily Al-Akhbar that it has become clear that violence is on the rise on the Egyptian street and that the shooting should open the file of the culture of violence. Egypt has recently witnessed inter-familial crimes: a father kills his sons and a son kills his father and brothers, a mother commits a cold-blooded murder by killing her children. "Criminals have become more ferocious. The language of love has been substituted by that of weapons," Hussein summed up. Khalil Fadel wrote in the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Yom that without doubt, the shooting was a serious turning point in Egyptian violence. He referred to a previous article in which he predicted that the next killer would not have any criminal record and that he would be one of us. The crime and the rise in violence prompted Fadel to wonder whether any ruler or official could reassure us on the fate of our children and grandchildren or reassure us (even untruthfully) that what happened would not happen again. Fadel expressed much doubt this was possible because the two massacres in Al-Nozha and Al-Baragil, the early suicide of youth, and the worry over the fate of the Nile's waters are matters that do not bring any hope. However, Fadel added sarcastically, while the pictures of the incident and the funeral of the victims were on the front pages of the newspapers, there was another picture about the debut of the London taxi in Egypt. It is a new luxurious service with well-dressed drivers. The trip from the airport to October City cost LE300, just LE100 less than the basic salary of the company driver who opened fire. Fadel had no comment on the discrepancy. There are no signs that the standoff between lawyers and judges will be resolved soon. Ahmed El-Sawi noted that the state appeared indifferent to the standoff during the last few weeks and was not exerting effort to stop the "civil war". He provided two possibilities for the state's indifference: either a genuine deficiency which has made decision- makers incapable of assessing the political and social danger of the standoff or the state has a genuine reason behind leaving the crisis to fester. While he regarded the two as posing serious dangers, El-Sawi saw the second as the more dangerous because it indicated that the state understands the danger of the stand-off but decided to leave it as is so as to render more psychological harm to the judges. Thus all the demands for judicial supervision over the elections would be relinquished. This crisis is being deliberately drawn out as if there is somebody who wants to say to the people, 'these are the judges that you trust'. No matter what, "there is nothing that justifies the state's silence and indifference to the crisis unless it is incapable of understanding it or is conspiring against everybody, including itself," El-Sawi wrote in the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Yom.
