The plaque at the historic entrance of Giza's Saidieh Secondary School seems to gaze out solemnly, as if defying age and time. The year of the school's construction was 1908, and the plaque, along with the grandeur of the historic school's spacious premises, immediately conjures up memories of days gone by, when Egypt was striding towards modernisation and was at the forefront of an educational movement that shaped both Egyptian and Arab consciousness. The Saidieh School, one of the oldest in modern Egypt, can be seen as a symbol of past glory and, more sadly, of how education has deteriorated in recent decades. The school, one of the largest in the Middle East, was named after Said Pasha, the son of Mohamed Ali Pasha, after the family of the Khedive Ismail donated the land on which the school was built. It stands on an area of 29 feddans, with spacious playgrounds surrounding 92 well-ventilated, classically high‐ceilinged classrooms and 13 scientific, language and media labs. Located beside Cairo University in Giza, the grandeur of the school's historic buildings seem to be in a battle with its immediate surroundings, the heavy traffic and noise pushing such happy memories back and telling of a more challenging present. Egypt's education system ranks as one of the worst in the world in international reports. The 2013 Global Competitiveness Report, based on surveys of business leaders, places Egypt at the bottom of 148 countries, ranked according to the quality of their primary education. Likewise, the World Economic Forum, a Swiss nonprofit organisation, ranked Egypt as one of the worst countries in the world for the quality of education in 2014. Though suffering from the repercussions of an ailing education system, the Saidieh School still seems to live up to part of its name (Saidia means “happy” in Arabic). Although almost all public schools in Egypt have problems with poor teaching, heavy reliance on private tutoring, overstuffed and sometimes irrelevant syllabuses and rote‐learning techniques, many schools don't have Saidieh's privileges. Many public schools, especially those in underprivileged rural areas, hardly have playgrounds or labs. Some are poorly maintained and suffer from crumbling buildings and are even awash in sewage water. Almost all the classes, most of which are poorly ventilated, are crammed with up to 100 students. This academic year, like many previous ones, has been heralded by a series of incidents that have further underlined the plight of public education in Egypt, ranging from damaged school buildings, teacher absences, school book delays, the heavy reliance on private tutoring and, above all, violence. History may help explain the contrasts. Saidieh is a historic edifice, and was built at a time when the government gave special attention to school architecture and settings, while most of today's poorly designed and maintained schools epitomise the 30‐year legacy of neglect and corruption under ousted former president Hosni Mubarak. Under the Mubarak regime, many agree, the affluent classes sent their children to expensive private schools, leaving the poor to fend for themselves in over‐crowded and incompetent government‐run schools. But the contrast does not refer only to buildings: education, the architect of social behaviour, consciousness and economy, has also mirrored Egypt's long history of political and social conflict. The Saidieh School came to public attention in April 2013 when students protested against its administration in front of the Education Ministry in Cairo. They were protesting in support of 17‐year‐old Ahmed Taha, arrested in October 2011 at the funeral of fellow protestor and police‐torture victim Essam Atta and detained for nine months without charge. Taha was released after he was proven innocent, only to find himself expelled from school due to his nine-month absence. He was reinstated after protests in his support. But students also protested against what they termed corruption in the administration and the expulsion of another five students charged with having taken part in protests against a teacher who had allegedly verbally and physically abused them. Such activism is not new to the Saidieh School. Its students, perhaps because they are close to Cairo University, have long been politically active, especially during Egypt's historic national struggle against British colonisation at the turn of the 20th century. Despite the differences between the two cases, the suspension of Taha may conjure up memories of, for instance, Wafd leader Yassin Serageddin, who was similarly expelled from the school at the turn of the 20th century. Serageddin had refused to bow to threats of expulsion by the school administration at the time, which had also been dissuading students from engaging in protests. Students at the school, however, remained unbowed. They took part in the 1919 Revolution against British colonisation and lost one of their colleagues, Mustafa Maher Amin, who was killed in the protests. But this similarity does not mean the calibre of the school's graduates is anything like the same. Saidieh in the past was not just a hotbed of political activism: it was also fertile soil for the production of many renowned figures in all domains, including culture and science. When the school opened, Ahmed Pasha Abdel‐Wahab, was among the first of the school's graduates. First in his class at the time, he went on to be appointed minister of finance. The school's graduates also include a list of renowned figures in political, scientific and cultural domains, together with famous actors like Youssef Wahbi and Ahmed Mazhar. Hussein Pasha Serri, who served as prime minister between 1940‐1952, former prime minister Atef Ebeid, former minister of agriculture Youssef Wali, and Wafd leader Fouad Serag Al-Din are among the renowned figures who graduated from Al‐Saidia. Other graduates include Abdel‐Rahman Azzam, the first secretary‐general of the Arab League, veteran journalist and political activist Fikri Pasha Abaza, veteran writer Tawfiq Al‐Hakim, renowned theoretical physicist Mustafa Mosharafa, who contributed to the development of quantum theory as well as the theory of relativity, and veteran engineer, politician and founder of the Osman Group, Osman Ahmed Osman. However, as time passes, these prominent figures are pushed back in people's memories, and history may have little or nothing to chronicle of those graduating from public schools in Egypt over the last decade.
A HISTORY OF EDUCATION: The US writer Judith Cochran, the author of Education in Egypt, shows in her book how Egypt moved from religious to secular education and once led the Arab world in both domains. For over a thousand years, Al‐Azhar University has been the centre of Islamic scholarship, education and thought. “In the early 19th century, Egypt forged ahead of the rest of the Muslim world in secular education after Mohamed Ali set up the first modern medical, veterinary engineering and accounting schools in the area,” Cochran writes. Mohamed Ali modernised education in Egypt in the second half of the 19th century after he had taken part in protests against British colonisation. Azhar's kuttabs (small schools where children learned the Quran and Arabic) gradually went out of fashion and were replaced by a range of public schools, including first‐class schools for those good at academic subjects and private Catholic schools for the elite. Many historians agree that Egypt started to introduce modern schooling far earlier than most countries in the region. Free public primary education was introduced in the 1940s, but was further expanded in 1950 to include the secondary stage when intellectual Taha Hussein, who lived up to his motto “education is like the air we breathe and the water we drink,” was appointed minister of education. It was thanks to Hussein's passion for education that the vast majority of the nation became literate. After the 1952 Revolution, free education was further expanded by then-president Gamal Abdel‐Nasser, who introduced free university education. There is almost a consensus among educationalists and historians alike that although Egypt's public schools and universities were few before the revolution, the education they offered was excellent and a far cry from the standard offered over the following decades. One important aspect of the era was that those at the helm of the education system gave great attention to school architecture and facilities, something that gradually diminished over the years. “Teachers at the time were devoted, highly esteemed by society, and private tutoring was almost nonexistent, except for those who needed it,” Salah Shahine, a 78‐year‐old Ain Shams University chemistry professor, recalls. Shahine remembers the good old days when he was a secondary student at the Tanta Al-Thanawiya School, one of Egypt's first‐class schools, whose elegant buildings were later turned into Tanta University. “The school was furnished with playgrounds and labs and there was special care for activities,” Shahine continued. There was much focus on Arabic and history, according to Shahine, and there was great emphasis on reading and writing. One testimony to the high quality of the education at the time was that those completing each stage, including the primary stage, could qualify for office jobs, sometimes even working as court clerks, according to Shahine. “Vocational schools were also of high quality and catered to market demands,” he added. “The fact that each stage of school education, including the primary stage, catered for a certain demand in the labour market meant that those who completed a university education also got jobs.” For Kamal Mogheeth, a researcher on education, education at the time was part of a comprehensive national project that had many political, economic and social aspects. “Education was part and parcel of a project that allowed for political freedoms and activism, that cherished the constitution and the parliament, and that instilled a nationalist spirit that condoned the values of national independence and the struggle against colonisation,” Mogheeth said. “The education system, school environment, textbooks and activities were all geared towards promoting the values of citizenship and social justice. It was no wonder that you could find 16‐year‐old secondary students who were politically aware, had a high sense of nationalism, and were academically excellent,” he added. The fact that education was given priority in the national budget, according to Mogheeth, also meant that teachers were well paid, highly respected and devoted. Such public spending meant that no school was built without playgrounds and that extracurricular activities were given special emphasis. In the decades since the 1952 Revolution, unofficial figures indicate that Egypt has doubled the number of primary schools and dramatically increased public spending on education. A recent UNICEF report found that almost nine out of every ten Egyptian boys and girls are currently enrolled in school. University enrolment has also reportedly increased by more than ten times. But the expansion of public education seems to have come at the expense of quality. Experts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have been warning since the late 1990s that the rapid expansion of access to education is being accomplished at the expense of educational quality. According to a Carnegie study, “Demographic pressures and increasingly strained resources have resulted in the physical disrepair of many primary schools, overcrowded classrooms, and poor teacher morale and motivation in the face of low salaries.” Although textbooks have still emphasised national values, they have been rewritten in a way that depends on the memorisation of lists of facts rather than critical thinking. As the numbers of those enrolled in public schools have expanded substantially, class sizes have averaged from between 40 to 100, and from the late 1970s and into the 1980s many of Egypt's qualified educational staff were offered jobs in the Gulf, where salaries were much higher. “Following the revolution, although education remained part and parcel of a nationalist programme, the Nasser regime had to compromise quality for the sake of enrolling more children in free education,” Mogheeth noted. During the era of late president Anwar Al‐Sadat, “there was no such thing as a nationalist project, and the socialist project of Nasser died out,” he added. “Sadat did not believe in the socialist project that considered the government responsible for providing services, including education and health.” The Sadat regime encouraged the private sector to build schools to relieve the pressure on public schools, and as teacher salaries dropped qualified teachers emigrated to oil‐producing countries for well‐paid jobs. But it was the former Mubarak regime that “dealt the death blow to public education in Egypt,” Mogheeth says. “The Mubarak regime, notorious for its corruption and theft of public funds, allowed for the creation of high‐class, good‐quality education with fees ranging between LE50,000 and LE70,000, that served almost four per cent of the population, mostly businessmen and those in the regime circle, while leaving 96 per cent of the population fending for themselves in poor quality public and private schools. “While the middle class struggled to save for private schooling and/or private tutoring, those who could not afford it remained in public schools and produced a generation that is near to illiterate,” he says. Poor funding has always constituted a large part of the problem of education in Egypt, but its quality has also been a reflection of a corrupt system that does not allow for a proper and socially just allocation of budgets, a legacy that has hardly died out. Last year, official reports showed that Egypt spent LE45 billion ($6 billion), or nearly four per cent of GDP, on education, and critics say this could have made greater headway had it been properly allocated without corruption. Yet, in the 2013‐2014 education budget, for instance, while 83 per cent of the budget was allocated to salaries and payments for Education Ministry workers and teachers, teachers' salaries remained low since a large part of the budget was spent on bonuses for high‐ranking officials and research that remained largely in closed drawers. Meanwhile, only LE5.4 billion (6.7 per cent of the same year's budget) was allocated to purchasing educational requirements and services, and around LE7.7 billion (9.4 per cent) was allocated for educational investments. International reports now indicate that primary education in Egypt is not of sufficient quality to ensure that all students even learn the basics. Official reports indicate that the reading and writing skills of 85 per cent of fourth to sixth graders, as well as those of 35 per cent of high school students, are currently so substandard as to border on illiteracy. Meanwhile, a 2007 UN study similarly lamented that 53 per cent of Egyptian children in the eighth grade (aged 13 and 14) failed to achieve even the lowest international benchmark in mathematics. Substantial investment in education “has not helped the economy improve as employers and businessmen complain of an increasingly low‐skilled labour force,” according to Carnegie. There is almost a consensus among businessmen that a shortage of talented workers has been one of the major obstacles to growth in the country. In the meantime, public spending on education has not helped fight poverty, Carnegie said, because “learning outcomes have been disappointing” and too few people have the skills to exploit the opportunities available to those with better education.
LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS: Although Egypt's recently amended 2014 Constitution has increased public spending on education, the consensus remains that there must be greater political will and professional vision to overhaul the entire system of education. Educationalists agree that the government as a whole, not just the Ministry of Education, but also the cabinet and perhaps the regime itself, should set out proper homegrown or internationally inspired criteria, a clear vision, and a holistic programme that will put education in Egypt back on track and assess results. Such criteria should address problems relating to poor infrastructure and lack of activities, class crowding, the ratio of teachers to students, teachers' low salaries and high work load, rote-learning techniques, overstuffed and sometimes irrelevant school books, and they should enforce proper supervision over schools. Such things do not mean that Egypt should copy foreign models of education, Mogheeth said. “Rather, we need to look back in time when education was in its heyday and when it was at the heart of a comprehensive national project that condoned the values of citizenship, social justice and renaissance in all domains of culture and science,” he concluded.
