Everyone with children in schools raise your hands. Now, those of you who are shelling out money for "private tuition keep your hands up. Chances are, the room's still full of a sea of trembling raised hands. However, you can all heave a sigh of relief. You will no longer have to divert household funds into making sure you children understand biology. Private tuition is about to become a fading nightmare; the Minister of Education says so. The ministry looks set to squeeze a law through Parliament in July that says that private tuition is illegal and any teacher breaking the law does so under pain of dismissal. In return for their adhering to this law, teachers can look forward to a rise in their salary of up to LE 70. That should take care of all their financial considerations, ensuring they can feed, clothe and educate their own kids and obviate the need for them to work after-hours and give private tuitions. See? Problem solved. Why didn't anybody think of it sooner? It is mind-boggling that someone, anyone, believes that this piece of legislation could be presented as a means of solving any of the ills of our ailing educational system. It's roughly the equivalent of telling someone who just lost a leg in a car crash that they really should have known better and handing them a band-aid. On average, public school teachers' salaries start at LE 150 per month. With experience, and the usual social compensations it can soar to dizzying heights of almost LE 400 per month. The Ministry of Administrative Development (which is spearheading the law) says that the total salary of teachers will eventually reach LE 547. For this salary, our teachers are expected to educate classes that, in some cases, can be engorged with up to 80 students. And then they are supposed to go away and feed, clothe, educate and provide transport for their own children. In any country, public school teachers are overworked, underpaid and generally under-appreciated. But a salary of less than LE 200 is a cruel and inhuman joke. The independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm recently ran a story on a young man who had struggled his way out of his village, become a certified teacher and after four years of searching finally found a teaching job; at LE 170. Since transport expenses devoured LE 160 of his salary, the young man head for Ras Gharib to take up work at the mines there. He got lost and died in the desert from starvation and dehydration. His story is becoming something of a battle-hymn for teachers. The injustice is blatant. We expect them to educate and raise our children - certainly they spend almost as much time with them than we do - and we pay them less than household help. The proposed law is clumsily atrocious in more ways than one. It isn't just a matter of money, although the financial aspects are prominent and deserve immediate attention. Much of the country is struggling to make ends meet. Despite an increasing growth rate (an estimated seven percent last year, according to government figures) the poverty level in Egypt is actually on the rise. The trickle-down theory (where the benefits of economic growth eventually make their way down to all the rungs of the socioeconomic ladder) clearly just isn't getting any application in Egypt. Of course, one could argue that private tuition is already illegal, that parents often have to struggle to come up with money for it and that some teachers deliberately under-perform so that students have no choice but to pay up or perform badly. All of which is true, but it remains an optional evil. And as with many poor economies, Egypt's adapts itself wonderfully to those in need; many teachers will give private tuition to large groups of students often at nominal fees per head. Essentially, it's a repeat of the school process, only it's efficient. The economic squeeze is pinching teachers cruelly. Private tuition, where teachers give private lessons to students, has often been represented in popular literature as a means for teachers to become dizzyingly rich at the expense of poor parents. In fact, teachers are usually parents themselves and the extra income goes towards paying for their own children's private tuition and ensuring a measure of comfort and dignity in their standard of living. For the government to insist that a paltry LE 70 is somehow going to make up the discrepancy in the household income would seem to indicate that policy makers are horrifyingly out of touch with real life. Nor is it merely a matter of money. The emphasis on the salaries is merely an indicator that policy makers might not have a solid vision to tackle the ills of our educational system. Any business model includes provision for a series of incentives and evaluations. We can pay teachers, but what incentives are there for them to perform well (or, considering that it's almost impossible to fire a government employee, what incentives are there for them to perform at all?) And if they perform, how do we evaluate them? What accountability procedures are in place? An education official in Alexandria once told me wearily that there were about four times as many teachers registered in Alexandria as were actually teaching. This is despite the fact that public school classes often held over 70 children. And, with minor differences, the teachers were paid on the same basis, regardless of performance. There was no parent-teacher interaction, parents had no way of judging how well their children were being monitored or educated and they had little recourse if they were dissatisfied. Apparently, we're content to merely throw teachers into a classroom with our children, underpay them, and forget about them. The above, of course, is mostly true for public schooling. While all schools, public and private, involve private tutoring, private school teachers tend to be better paid. Once again, the country's poor have to live with the worst that it can offer. Passing decrees or attempting to have laws passed is only effective if those laws strike at the heart of a country's problems. If they tackle only a surface issue, then the most they can be counted on to do is complicate the situation. In this case, it appears to boil down to a frightening mix of hubris and ignorance on the part of the Ministry. Someone thinks that telling teachers that they have to live on LE 250 a month on pain of dismissal is going to solve a problem. It would be funny if anyone involved were able to laugh about it. And it proves that someone at the back of the class just isn't paying attention. Mirette F. Mabroukis the former publisher of The Daily Star Egypt
