SHORTLY after taking office, Egypt's Minister of Education Ahmed Zaki Badr announced that he intends to postpone the new Thanawiya Amma (General Certificate of Secondary Education) system for a year and reconsider the suggestion of evaluating the first and second year of the certificate. The Minister said that he had taken this decision because the governmental schools hadn't the facilities to apply this new system. Every new minister of education drives a coach and horses through the plans and projects of the previous one. This is especially true of the Thanawiya Amma system, which was heavily criticised when it was suggested by former Minister of Education Youssri el-Gamal, particularly as he insisted on enforcing the evaluation system to make sure pupils actually go to school and to lessen their dependence on private tuition. However, most governmental schools are in a very poor state of repair and their teachers are paid very little. This means that enforcing the evaluation system would lead to even more dependence on private tuition. The system, that awards a lot of marks for class work and artistic activities, needs to be reconsidered, after being enforced on other stages of education. Officials at the Ministry of Education must have noticed that privateschools have been more successful than the governmental schools in applying this system. While private schools give their pupils high marks for class work andactivities, in order to please their parents, teachers at the governmental schools give their pupils low marks to pressurise their parents into letting their children have private lessons with the teachers at these schools. The result is a major difference and discriminationbetween pupils at the same stage. Another kind of discrimination is that pupils have same curricula, although they go to school in different governorates. Pupils in governorates like 6th October have to sit their final year exams two weeks earlier than those in Cairo Governorate, putting more pressure on the teachers and pupils in the former to finish the curricula earlier, for no apparent reason.
