Dr. Hossam Badrawi Official Website
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article entitled Difference of Meanings and Disputes of Definitions, and I was invited a few days ago to a dialogue about the future of education in Egypt, and I found myself returning to the possibility of different meanings of words in the mind of the questioner and the questioner, and I decided to check and agree first on the definition and meaning before delving into the issue of the future of education.
And since the whole society talks about education, suffers from it, and hopes for it, and everyone drowns in its details, I thought first to define my intentions, and secondly to link the future with the present and the past.
There is a confusion between the concept of learning and knowledge and education, between the goal and the means. School and university education are our means of learning, acquiring knowledge, and acquiring skills.
Come with me for a brief excursion about the history of the school, how it began in the first place, and how it developed, to know where the dialogue leads us.
I read a book about the greatest personalities that influenced the reality of humanity, and I did not find that the vast majority of them were students in a school in its current sense.. Neither Ali bin Abi Talib with his wisdom, nor Buddha nor Confucius, nor Al-Farabi nor Ibn Sina nor Hippocrates, nor Newton the owner of the theory Gravity is not equal to the inventor of paper and before him the Egyptian who wrote on papyrus, nor the architects of temples and pyramids, nor those who invented the calendar and agricultural machinery, nor most of those who started the industrial revolution, nor Gutenberg the inventor of the printing press, nor Leonard Da Vinci nor Shakespeare, and to them were added the leaders of armies and those They ruled the world like Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and their ilk, and before them all the rightly guided caliphs, and after them those who ruled the world east and west and who conquered and established empires.. and those who were the basis of philosophy such as Aristotle, Plato, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Khaldun and others, all of them did not enter a formal school in our sense, which is The form and method that appeared in the eighteenth century only with the aim of teaching religion and preparing armies.
Yes, the primary goal of the school was to call for religion with the concept of its men, obedience and war skill with the concept of conquest and power for the rulers.
So the school in its systemic concept was, and unfortunately still is, the expulsion of groups of people who believe in the ideas of those who set their system for them, and that they succeed if they agree with the specific answer and fail if they violate it. There is one right and the rest is wrong. There is a test that measures the student’s compatibility with the specified answer, even though all those who made history leaps are the ones who deviated from the usual, thought outside the box and stereotypes, and raised the ceiling of their imagination beyond what a previous generation decided for them..
Einstein, the distinguished scientist, says that he was learning until he entered the school, and he says, “Education is not the learning of facts, but rather the training of the mind to think, and we cannot solve a problem using the same mentality that created it.”
If we look at our schools today with a pragmatic and practical logic, we must take a serious pause.
School and our educational system are just a means, not the end in itself.
What do we want from our children and youth in the future?? How can we make a qualitative shift in the learning method, and not follow the same methods that produced what we are complaining about now…
I will give you a practical example:
You have a factory, and it has production lines, from which products come out, with high quality, its aim is to have a demand in the local market and the global export…
If you come up with the best machines, build production lines, hire millions of incompetent workers, and slowly produce a product that the market does not need, with low quality, and you lose your capital and your raw resources despite their excellence, and you cannot benefit from the output of this factory, because the market does not want it, then you are a loser and you will go bankrupt. no way..
Schools in Egypt are your factories for the production of competent, competitive human beings who raise the value of your country. If the factory continues to operate in the same way, you will get the same loss year after year and generation after generation.
A little patience with me to understand the theory……
Your raw materials, and they are our children and youth, are in fact of the best quality and similar to their peers in the countries of the world, and I can prove that historically and presently… But we have repeatedly decided, over the past fifty years, that our schools, teachers, and education officials, who are our human power in managing our resources, are the least efficient And the lowest wages (of course there are booms and exceptions) and our factory production lines (I mean our schools) became the least efficient. The market, however, we insist on completing the work in the same way and the same method!!!!..
Is there stupidity and blurry vision like this!!
The factory loses, and no matter how you renew its mechanisms and change its mechanisms in order to produce the same product, and you spend billions on building similar factories, you will get the same result, and the loss will double.
Another example: Imagine that you want to go to Alexandria and choose to take the train or the car heading to Aswan, so no matter how much you renew the car, change the driver, widen the road and repave it ten times, in the end you are going to a place you do not intend.. you will reach Aswan, not Alexandria..
Did you achieve your purpose??
Did you reach your goal??
Did your bragging about spending, effort, and perspiration in the means get you to what you want???
The issue, gentlemen, is not in school only because it is a means, it is a factory for learning and obtaining skills and knowledge needed by the present and the future.
We, as officials and parents drowned in the dispute over the margins of means, have become, with the same methodology year after year.
The question is, what is the paradiem shift that we need to reach the goal of learning, acquiring knowledge and preparing for the future… The goal needs to be defined.
The most important skills that must be focused on now are: communication and communication skills, the ability to adapt to change, and the ability to work in teams, in addition to them the leadership skills that many jobs need at multiple levels..in addition to digital skills and computer use. , artificial intelligence and knowledge of a second language or more besides Arabic.
All of this must be covered by the values of accuracy, proficiency, integrity, respect for the different, and raising the ceiling of imagination and creativity.
These skills are needed by doctors, engineers, lawyers, officers, teachers and workers in all disciplines. There is no place in work today and definitely in the future for those who do not possess them.
The journey to the future begins with a clear goal and strategy.
Let our strategy be to achieve a critical size of success with a comprehensive vertical reform to achieve the goal. Let our critical size be numerical, qualitative and geographical.
It is possible to follow the model of selecting the effective critical size, by specifying a number of schools from each governorate, or each of the schools in a governorate. Egypt did this in schools that it called experimental schools. It was transformed from an experiment into government schools for languages, but it is an experiment, despite its relative success, that was not integrated with vertical reform in the concept of The future, qualitatively, administratively and technologically, but it was a respectable experience.
I suggest schools in the governorates of the Suez Canal axis, Fayoum, Qena and Luxor, for example.. and within 5 years, education will change in them completely, with standards of measurement and periodic follow-up after prior preparation outside the usual box for a well-known surgical procedure.. that the community sees as a model that can be repeated.
Why am I talking about achieving success on a critical scale, because experience says that education reform processes as a method fail if they depend on moving broadly and accidentally in densely populated societies at the same time, using the same means? However, the rest of the system should not be ignored.
There are seven priorities for this to work:
1- The priority of setting financial budgets and making them available to achieve the goal without concession. 2- Declaring a time frame and adhering to it. 3- Selecting an auditor for the quality of principals and teachers through international competitions, and setting very high salaries for them within a serious and sharp framework of their obligations towards experience. With continuous training and raising their academic and social level. 4- Resolute application of quality assurance, accreditation and work on its implementation, 5- Using curricula in languages, science, mathematics, technology and artificial intelligence to address the future.
6- Providing coexistence for students within these schools, including competitive sports practices and training in various types of arts, and trips inside and outside Egypt to learn about the history and culture of their country over time, as an essential part of the study curriculum, with social care for their families. 7- Legislative protection for the reform phase that will be enjoyed have experience.
As for universities and granting degrees, universities in their traditional form must change, and the years of study in them must evolve, increasing and decreasing according to specialization, because the labor market precedes them in development and innovation, otherwise they will lose their job in making the future.
We should not think of higher education as a reaction to the current labor market situation, unemployment rates, or the state of a profession at a specific moment in time. Filling the void of needs only. It qualifies young people and builds a normal personality that respects differences and avoids extremism.
The most important question is what do we consider universities as builders of civilization or providers of educational and training services, because that will create a difference in our view of these institutions.
The university institution needs to know the reasons for change or the reasons for sticking with traditions. In order for her to do this, she must question what has been gained and also test the different modes of thinking that exist in society. The university must also take the risk of presenting everything unexpected to the societies that make it easy for the matter to remain as it is, and even fight renewal and change in order to preserve the reality that has been accustomed to, even if it is criticized.
Universities embody the processes of change in any society, but they are now panting behind the industries and technology coming from the labor market, not the other way around!
The origin of the university is to innovate and assimilate the new, transfer and create knowledge, and achieve harmony and adaptation between knowledge and how to obtain and use it in the present time, and the requirements of the future. Based on this, the role of academic institutions is confirmed in research, teaching, research, auditing, and providing assistance for all activities on the basis of their ability to oppose (the critical dimension) and agree (the need for commitment).
Without the academic research dimension and the human values of the research community, the progress that we seek may turn into chaos… In short, we are undoubtedly facing very rapid changes in the midst of a world of economic, social, cultural, scientific and technological booms. The challenge facing educational systems is great, and if the rate of change within any educational institution is slower than the rate of change occurring outside it, then we must wait for its end in the foreseeable future.
The educational system that ignores the developments and changes that constitute tomorrow will end its relationship or attachment to the lives of the students and will gradually diminish, and for this we must reformulate our educational institutions from pre-school to university to prepare our students for the appropriate preparation for the future and not for the past.
Guys, whatever the mind imagines will happen, otherwise it would not occur to the mind.. The important thing is how do we participate in creating the future and not remain sitting in spectators’ seats, clapping sometimes, and criticizing more sometimes?? How, when we participate, we preserve morals and societal values that we declare and adhere to while building it, without transcendence over others, without violence, discrimination, hatred, or atonement, with an open mind, and by searching for proofs, respect for difference and pluralism of thought.
