Hossam Badrawi Official Website
Education…the opportunity to save
Written by
Hossam Badrawi
(1)
Published in Al-Masry Al-Youm
On the occasion of the appointment of a new ministry in the president’s last constitutional term, and my desire for his success and my hope to save the country’s future, I decided to return to the dialogue on education and look positively at what could bring about a qualitative shift in building the Egyptian human being, one of the most important gateways to sustainable development, which is education.
I reviewed Egypt’s Vision 2030, which I undertook with Dr. Ashraf El-Arabi, when he was Minister of Planning, issued it with more than a hundred experts, and the reports issued by the Education Committee in Parliament and the initiatives that it put forward when I assumed responsibility between the years 2000 to 2005, and all the reports that I issued in the Education Committee of the National Party from 2002 to 2010 and then what I recorded it in my book “Education…the Opportunity to Save,” which I wrote in 2010, the first edition of which was published in 2011 and the second edition in 2013. Surprisingly, what the experts formulated is still valid today, as if education in Egypt is a secret, but rather new, pressing and terrifying challenges have added to it.
Therefore, I decided to support the new government in every way to move towards a brighter and less painful future for Egypt’s situation in education.
The success of any educational policy must depend on a number of foundations, the most important of which is that education and learning are two continuous processes that begin from birth until the end of life. However, formal education represents its most important link and plays the main role in providing the individual with communication skills, knowledge of language, mathematics, arts, and computers, the ability to obtain information, self-learning, and behaviors related to all of this, and the ability to adapt to future variables.
The development of education in Egyptian society should not be isolated in any way from the development of learning systems and methods around the world.
We must remember and remind each other that education is a citizen’s right guaranteed by the constitution for all, and not a service for which he must pay. Public education is that which accommodates 90% of children and youth. The participation of the private sector is welcome and the state’s role in it is a regulator and guarantor of quality, but it is not a substitute for public education.
We must remember that the school is still the basic unit of education, the teacher is its living cell, and its management is its nervous system, and any development must depend on the preparation of the teacher, as he is the first creator of development, and he is his means, and his social and material conditions must be reconsidered and worked on. Raise his literary standing in society.
Wisdom says that “the level of education in any nation does not rise above the level of its teachers.”
Every success must have a strategy, and in nations with a large population such as Egypt, a critical level of achievement must be achieved that has an intrinsic driving force for the rest of society that makes it desire the same success. Gradual development must be protected legislatively.
In order for the vision of developing education in Egypt to be achieved, we must take into account the importance of accurately defining the current education situation in a comparative perspective with what is going on around us at the regional and global levels, honestly, and not for self-satisfaction, or to please the political leadership. In addition to studying the reasons for not implementing the education vision and policies. Over 25 continuous years, or applied in a way that led to its failure and unsustainability.
I repeatedly stress the importance of sustaining commitment to a declared reference and strategy, which is reviewed every number of years. In the development vision, we proposed the formation of a higher education council that would ensure the sustainability of the application no matter how governments changed, but as usual it arose truncated and its composition was mostly an executive authority and not a community of experts.
The transition from vision and policy to implementation always faces new developments. We must stand before them, face them, and discuss them with reason and objectivity, seeking to overcome them to reach the desired results. We must participate with society in understanding these challenges, and sticking to development policies so that the transition from The place where we stand is where we are going…and identifying challenges leads to solutions, which are:
(First): Weak community confidence in official government educational institutions, the emergence of an informal system parallel to the educational system outside of school, and the widespread spread of private lessons.
(Second): Weak confidence in the basic pillar of the educational process, which is the teacher, a decrease in his social ability, and a reduction in his powers to evaluate and evaluate the student.
(Third): Low degree of proficiency in languages, including Arabic, weak level in mathematics and science, and young people’s avoidance of specializing in them.
(Fourth): The decrease in the volume of student activities or their absence in many cases, with all the negative meanings it carries in building personality.
(Fifth): The presence of a large gap in educational curricula and their failure to keep pace with the acceleration occurring in knowledge and the necessity of linking it with the needs of society, the future labor market, and the technological development occurring in the world.
(Sixth): The unprecedented geographical spread of schools throughout Egypt, including the positive aspect of availability, nevertheless constitutes a major challenge in managing them centrally, and an extreme difficulty in raising their level and evaluating their performance.
(Seventh): A decrease in school hours, and a significant increase in the phenomenon of student absence, especially at the secondary level, which marginalizes the role of the school in building the personality of students and wastes the educational value of its presence.
(Eighth): The pressure of public examinations in their current form and the fact that they do not measure higher thinking abilities and creativity and create a social and political climate of anger and a sense of injustice is reflected in the increasing loss of confidence in the credibility of educational institutions, compounded by a change in the culture of parents who support cheating and even defend it.
(Ninth): The incomplete infrastructure for digital transformation in education for students in their homes, teachers in their classrooms, and school administration that is far from digital.
Most of these challenges are due to four reasons:
First: The inadequacy of available funding, despite its increasing volume over the years, for development needs, and spending that is not committed to goals, which reduces its effectiveness.
Written by
Hossam Badrawi
(1)
Published in Al-Masry Al-Youm
On the occasion of the appointment of a new ministry in the president’s last constitutional term, and my desire for his success and my hope to save the country’s future, I decided to return to the dialogue on education and look positively at what could bring about a qualitative shift in building the Egyptian human being, one of the most important gateways to sustainable development, which is education.
I reviewed Egypt’s Vision 2030, which I undertook with Dr. Ashraf El-Arabi, when he was Minister of Planning, issued it with more than a hundred experts, and the reports issued by the Education Committee in Parliament and the initiatives that it put forward when I assumed responsibility between the years 2000 to 2005, and all the reports that I issued in the Education Committee of the National Party from 2002 to 2010 and then what I recorded it in my book “Education…the Opportunity to Save,” which I wrote in 2010, the first edition of which was published in 2011 and the second edition in 2013. Surprisingly, what the experts formulated is still valid today, as if education in Egypt is a secret, but rather new, pressing and terrifying challenges have added to it.
Therefore, I decided to support the new government in every way to move towards a brighter and less painful future for Egypt’s situation in education.
The success of any educational policy must depend on a number of foundations, the most important of which is that education and learning are two continuous processes that begin from birth until the end of life. However, formal education represents its most important link and plays the main role in providing the individual with communication skills, knowledge of language, mathematics, arts, and computers, the ability to obtain information, self-learning, and behaviors related to all of this, and the ability to adapt to future variables.
The development of education in Egyptian society should not be isolated in any way from the development of learning systems and methods around the world.
We must remember and remind each other that education is a citizen’s right guaranteed by the constitution for all, and not a service for which he must pay. Public education is that which accommodates 90% of children and youth. The participation of the private sector is welcome and the state’s role in it is a regulator and guarantor of quality, but it is not a substitute for public education.
We must remember that the school is still the basic unit of education, the teacher is its living cell, and its management is its nervous system, and any development must depend on the preparation of the teacher, as he is the first creator of development, and he is his means, and his social and material conditions must be reconsidered and worked on. Raise his literary standing in society.
Wisdom says that “the level of education in any nation does not rise above the level of its teachers.”
Every success must have a strategy, and in nations with a large population such as Egypt, a critical level of achievement must be achieved that has an intrinsic driving force for the rest of society that makes it desire the same success. Gradual development must be protected legislatively.
In order for the vision of developing education in Egypt to be achieved, we must take into account the importance of accurately defining the current education situation in a comparative perspective with what is going on around us at the regional and global levels, honestly, and not for self-satisfaction, or to please the political leadership. In addition to studying the reasons for not implementing the education vision and policies. Over 25 continuous years, or applied in a way that led to its failure and unsustainability.
I repeatedly stress the importance of sustaining commitment to a declared reference and strategy, which is reviewed every number of years. In the development vision, we proposed the formation of a higher education council that would ensure the sustainability of the application no matter how governments changed, but as usual it arose truncated and its composition was mostly an executive authority and not a community of experts.
The transition from vision and policy to implementation always faces new developments. We must stand before them, face them, and discuss them with reason and objectivity, seeking to overcome them to reach the desired results. We must participate with society in understanding these challenges, and sticking to development policies so that the transition from The place where we stand is where we are going…and identifying challenges leads to solutions, which are:
(First): Weak community confidence in official government educational institutions, the emergence of an informal system parallel to the educational system outside of school, and the widespread spread of private lessons.
(Second): Weak confidence in the basic pillar of the educational process, which is the teacher, a decrease in his social ability, and a reduction in his powers to evaluate and evaluate the student.
(Third): Low degree of proficiency in languages, including Arabic, weak level in mathematics and science, and young people’s avoidance of specializing in them.
(Fourth): The decrease in the volume of student activities or their absence in many cases, with all the negative meanings it carries in building personality.
(Fifth): The presence of a large gap in educational curricula and their failure to keep pace with the acceleration occurring in knowledge and the necessity of linking it with the needs of society, the future labor market, and the technological development occurring in the world.
(Sixth): The unprecedented geographical spread of schools throughout Egypt, including the positive aspect of availability, nevertheless constitutes a major challenge in managing them centrally, and an extreme difficulty in raising their level and evaluating their performance.
(Seventh): A decrease in school hours, and a significant increase in the phenomenon of student absence, especially at the secondary level, which marginalizes the role of the school in building the personality of students and wastes the educational value of its presence.
(Eighth): The pressure of public examinations in their current form and the fact that they do not measure higher thinking abilities and creativity and create a social and political climate of anger and a sense of injustice is reflected in the increasing loss of confidence in the credibility of educational institutions, compounded by a change in the culture of parents who support cheating and even defend it.
(Ninth): The incomplete infrastructure for digital transformation in education for students in their homes, teachers in their classrooms, and school administration that is far from digital.
Most of these challenges are due to four reasons:
First: The inadequacy of available funding, despite its increasing volume over the years, for development needs, and spending that is not committed to goals, which reduces its effectiveness.
Second: Resistance by stable interests in light of the situation as it is now
Third: Failure to involve society and stakeholders in an effective partnership and positive understanding of educational development (the political function of the minister).
Fourth: Non-bias in the government’s applications of the budget for education. Despite the recognition of its priority, the education file, which affects the future, is competed with other files that may have short-term political effects or affect daily living needs. I see it mostly winning over the education file when priorities are applied. In addition to deductions from the education budget to pay off Egypt’s foreign debts!!
Failure to confront these challenges with the necessary determination and due priority has led and continues to lead to:
First: greater marginalization of the poor, and the inability of education – in its current state – to support positive social mobility as a direct or indirect result of it.
Second: The transfer of the most capable groups to private and foreign education, inside and outside Egypt, and its impact on general culture, the use of the Arabic language, and social separation between classes.
Third: charging the poorest groups more than they can bear in private lessons, increasing the space for pent-up anger, false and unreal freeness, and a negative social impact on public feeling.
The question is…can we get through all of this?
The answer is…yes we can.
The most important question is how, not just what?
Some of the needs for this may be:
1- Providing the necessary budget percentage without deduction, as stated in the constitution, and monitoring how spending is done.
2-Announcing and adhering to a time-bound strategy and announced measurement indicators.
3- Achieving a critical mass of rapid, vertically integrated success in all development strategies in a number of governorates, while occasional implementation in all countries may require a longer time.
4- Marketing – development strategy among all stakeholders, including service providers, students, parents, and the media.
5- Starting with school principals (an important key), which necessitates the application of decentralization.
6- Adherence to declared international quality rules.
7- Developing language, mathematics, science, and technology curricula in accordance with international standards.
8- Training teachers, raising their academic level, providing social care for them and the colleges from which they graduate, and working to develop colleges of education to be the main factory for graduating future teachers.
9- Protecting development legislatively and legally.
10- Creating competition between governorates, with material and moral incentive to enter the list of governorates that enjoy rapid vertical development.
The issue, gentlemen, is the efficiency of selecting political officials and executive professionals who believe in the philosophy of development and its sustainability, and perhaps the new government has taken that into consideration.
This article is the first in a series of four detailed articles in which I intend to attempt to support the fundamental opportunity for salvation…education
Third: Failure to involve society and stakeholders in an effective partnership and positive understanding of educational development (the political function of the minister).
Fourth: Non-bias in the government’s applications of the budget for education. Despite the recognition of its priority, the education file, which affects the future, is competed with other files that may have short-term political effects or affect daily living needs. I see it mostly winning over the education file when priorities are applied. In addition to deductions from the education budget to pay off Egypt’s foreign debts!!
Failure to confront these challenges with the necessary determination and due priority has led and continues to lead to:
First: greater marginalization of the poor, and the inability of education – in its current state – to support positive social mobility as a direct or indirect result of it.
Second: The transfer of the most capable groups to private and foreign education, inside and outside Egypt, and its impact on general culture, the use of the Arabic language, and social separation between classes.
Third: charging the poorest groups more than they can bear in private lessons, increasing the space for pent-up anger, false and unreal freeness, and a negative social impact on public feeling.
The question is…can we get through all of this?
The answer is…yes we can.
The most important question is how, not just what?
Some of the needs for this may be:
1- Providing the necessary budget percentage without deduction, as stated in the constitution, and monitoring how spending is done.
2-Announcing and adhering to a time-bound strategy and announced measurement indicators.
3- Achieving a critical mass of rapid, vertically integrated success in all development strategies in a number of governorates, while occasional implementation in all countries may require a longer time.
4- Marketing – development strategy among all stakeholders, including service providers, students, parents, and the media.
5- Starting with school principals (an important key), which necessitates the application of decentralization.
6- Adherence to declared international quality rules.
7- Developing language, mathematics, science, and technology curricula in accordance with international standards.
8- Training teachers, raising their academic level, providing social care for them and the colleges from which they graduate, and working to develop colleges of education to be the main factory for graduating future teachers.
9- Protecting development legislatively and legally.
10- Creating competition between governorates, with material and moral incentive to enter the list of governorates that enjoy rapid vertical development.
The issue, gentlemen, is the efficiency of selecting political officials and executive professionals who believe in the philosophy of development and its sustainability, and perhaps the new government has taken that into consideration.
This article is the first in a series of four detailed articles in which I intend to attempt to support the fundamental opportunity for salvation…education
