Education is another area where Mubarak's government has a long resume of abject failures. In today's Egypt, public education is official mythology; it simply doesn't exist in any meaningful way. The rate of illiteracy is a scandal, the decline of elite public institutions is a tragedy and the failure of public schools is a national disgrace. For several reasons, the public educational system needs emergency measures to salvage what's left of it. Nothing is as vital as creating and maintaining a world class pool of labor that can compete on a global basis and no social investment holds the promise of better returns. Egypt's primary export is human capital and improving the quality of our human resources will be the determining factor in the country's internal development. Developing a highly skilled industrial work force will not only create jobs, it will help market Egyptian workers abroad. It's a simple formula – the amount of remittances from Egyptians working abroad is directly related of the quality of our human resources. Among the nations lining the shores of the Mediterranean, Egypt continues to have a competitive edge in the cost of labor and we can maintain that edge for generations to come if we can field an army of well-trained professionals and technicians. Virtually every household in the country has suffered the consequences of the collapse of the public school system. The well off have resorted to sending their kids to outrageously expensive private schools and the less fortunate have to spend a good chunk of their household income on private tutors to compensate for the failures of our public schools. As the system has fallen into disarray, a significant percentage of impoverished Egyptian families have simply taken their kids out of school. That ought to be a crime and, in fact, it is a crime – one that regularly goes unpunished. Dismal numbers don't lie; sixty years after Taha Hussein ushered in free universal primary schooling, four out of ten Egyptians can't read and write. A public school education shouldn't cost a piaster but, for all practical purposes, the educational system has been privatized. Delivering on the promise of a free public education is mandated by law and will require the elevation of the crisis to a national project that is given priority over all others. If public schools in Egypt delivered the goods, the private tutoring salons would vanish along with the catastrophic bite on the middle and lower middle class incomes. Restoring the system would give an immediate boost to the standard of living for millions of Egyptian families that would no longer be obliged to give what amounts to involuntary subsidies to underpaid teachers that should be properly compensated by the state. Without the expense of private tutoring, families will be left with more pounds in their pockets to spend on everything else and that will help create demand for products and services produced by other sectors of the economy. So, how do you fix the educational system? You'd start where China started thirty years ago when they were obliged to reconstruct a higher education system that had been vandalized and virtually shut down during the Cultural Revolution. To duplicate China's success, we need to generously fund an emergency program to rescue and fortify Egypt's elite universities and restore their stature as world class institutions. Egypt needs a reverse brain drain. Every talented Egyptian professor should be seduced back from the Gulf, America and Europe and that will require one vital ingredient – money. There is no member in the Egyptian workforce that is more important than a highly qualified and talented professor. We need the ones that left to come back and we need to reward the ones that stayed. That will require an immediate and significant improvement in their compensation packages and their pensions. We should recognize them as a national treasure and reward them as such. More than money – we need to provide them with a modern infrastructure and restore the social prestige of teaching at an elite public institution. There was a time when teaching at Cairo or Alexandria University was a badge of honor and we need to turn back the clock and make it a national priority to create, retain and nurture talented professors. As new cadres of college graduates earn degrees from the elite institutions, it should take no more than ten years for the effects of this policy to trickle down to second tier institutions of higher learning. Once you tackle the problems of the elite institutions, you head straight to the bottom – primary schools and illiteracy programs. Any unemployed Egyptian college graduate, in any field, can be trained to be a competent primary school educator in a matter of a year or less. Invest heavily in attracting talented graduates from the faculties of law and other institutions, put them through the basic drills and then let them loose. Again there is only one way to induce them to consider this career option – money. Pay them and pay them well. The only incentive that will attract and retain a vast pool of competent primary school teachers is the promise of a decent income. Pay them while they train and pay them when they become qualified teachers. Here again, it is imperative to restore pride and social standing to the honorable profession of teaching. To cripple the private tutoring business – impose stiff criminal penalties and withdraw teaching certification from any teacher who markets his talents outside of the classroom. If you want to teach, do it in the classroom and do it well or suffer the consequences. Otherwise, you'll never get to teach again – even at private institutions. There is no reason in the world that Egypt should have crowded classrooms. Reducing the teacher/student ratios in primary schools would create hundreds of thousands of jobs for unemployed college graduates. Accompanying the development of human capital worthy of serving the national education system, urgent priority needs to be given to building adequate facilities. If we don't have bricks to build classrooms fast enough, we'll deploy army tents if that's what it takes. Rent apartments – take over other public buildings – do whatever is necessary and just get it done and get it done fast. It will take all of one year to launch this program, train the manpower and throw up the tents. The resurrection of Egypt's educational system will pay dividends for decades to come. If you apply the formula of throwing massive resources at the top of the educational pyramid while simultaneously propping up the base, it will take a decade for these two social investments to filter to the middle. It's like a military pincer strategy. That's the fix that will be needed to resurrect Egypt's public education system and let it rise from the ashes. On this count, the opposition can outclass the current regime any day of the week; if for no other reason than the fact that a new party in power will not be tainted with the neglect of the Mubarak regime. ** part 3 of this series will be published June 3 ** Ahmed Amr is an Arab-American economist, a political commentator and the former editor of NileMedia.com. He is the author of “Cilantro Dreams”, “The Sheep and the Guardians” and “My Name is Not Leila”
