Before the Revolution, Amani Tawfilis, a middle-aged dentist and mother of two university students, was quite interested in TV dramas, although she watched local news bulletins from time to time. But today Amani is keen to stay tuned to different talk shows and be constantly updated on current events such as the drafting of the new constitution, parliamentary elections and other political developments that were not within the circle of her interests before January 2011. Experts have pinpointed the fact that the mass media and Internet have played a major role in spreading awareness of concepts related to freedom of expression, citizens' rights, laws, elections and so on in the wake of the revolution. The Education Ministry took the initiative to include a new subject called ‘Citizenship' in the secondary school curricula as part of a comprehensive change in the educational system. The point is that the subject is included in the students' timetable, but some schools have no idea about the content, since the textbooks have not been distributed, although the academic year has already started more than four weeks ago. According to a source at the Curricula Upgrading Centre affiliated to the ministry, the textbooks are still being printed. The source that preferred to remain anonymous explained that the four-chapter book would highlight rights and liabilities as well as general topics on political awareness, civil society and women's rights. The late arrival of these textbooks has caused concern among teachers, who do not know how and what they are supposed to teach. They hope however that the content and approach to these topics would be different from what had been included in National Education, a subject that was always in the preparatory and secondary school curricula. “The students have often taken this subject too lightly, and as a result they did not benefit from it," Nashwa Mahmud, a social studies teacher at a private school, told the Egyptian Mail. She hoped that the Citizenship course would be informative, considering that the students were expressing a growing interest in politics. Nasser Ali, who has a PhD in educational methods and is on the Arab Council for Morals and Citizenship, has made press statements about an initiative to educate school children from KG up to secondary schools as well as university students on citizenship rights and responsibilities. He added that the material was still in the making and would not be delivered to educational institutions until the next academic year. “The council will ask the parliament to ratify a bill on the teaching of this material. But this can obviously not happen until a new parliament is elected."
