Hossam Badrawi Official Website
Community Awareness and the Future of Education
The entire community talks about education, suffers from it, and hopes for it, and everyone is drowning in its details. After ten consecutive articles, I saw the need to redefine my intentions and to connect the future with the present and the past.
There is confusion between the concepts of learning and knowledge and education, between the goal and the means, for education is our means to learning, not our goal. The dialogue about schools, institutes, and universities, unfortunately, revolves around the means rather than the goal.
Let’s embark on a brief journey through the history of schools and universities and how schools began, and how they evolved, to understand where the dialogue is leading us.
I read a book about the greatest personalities who influenced human reality and found that the majority of them were not students in a school in its current sense. Neither Muhammad, nor Jesus, nor Moses, nor Abraham, with all their impact on human history, learned in a school, nor did Buddha, Confucius, Al-Farabi, Hippocrates, Newton with his theory of gravity, and before him the Egyptian who wrote on papyrus, nor the engineers of temples and pyramids, nor those who invented the calendar, agricultural tools, nor most of those who started the Industrial Revolution, nor Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, nor Leonardo da Vinci, nor Shakespeare. And here I mention examples that the average reader knows… And Professor Aqad did not complete his school studies after elementary school and did not study at a university. I add to them those who were the foundations of civilization like Aristotle, Plato, Averroes, Ibn Khaldun, and others, all of whom did not enter a systematic school in our sense, which is the form and means that we accepted systematically only in the 18th century with the aim of teaching religion and preparing armies.
Yes, the implicit goal was to call for religion as understood by its men and obedience and military skill as understood by conquest and authority.
Therefore, the school in its systematic sense was, and unfortunately still is, to produce groups of humans who believe in the ideas set for them by those who established their system, and to succeed if they agree with the predetermined answer and to fail if they disagree. There is one right answer and the rest are wrong, there is a test that measures the extent to which the student conforms to the predetermined answer, although all those who made historical leaps are those who deviated from the usual, thought outside the box and the norm, and raised the ceiling of their imagination beyond what a previous generation decided.
If we look at our schools today with a pragmatic, practical logic, we must have a serious stand and make a sharp qualitative leap.
What is our goal from learning??
School and our education system are just a means and not the goal itself…
What do we want from our children and youth in the future??
And we must find its means, not follow the same means that produced what we now complain about…
I will give you a practical example:
You have a factory, with production lines, from which products come out, whose goal is to be sold in the local market and for export and to meet people’s needs…
If you bring in the best machines, and you stop the production line with incompetent workers, and you produce slowly, a product that the market does not need (in our case, it is not needed by the future of our country) and you lose the value of your production inputs and your excellent raw materials, and you cannot benefit from the outputs of this factory because the market does not want it, you are a loser and will inevitably go bankrupt…
Schools in Egypt are your factories for producing competent, competitive humans who raise the value of your country. If the factory continues to work 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, which are our children and youth, are of the finest types and similar to their peers in the world, and I can prove that historically and in the present… But we decided over the past fifty years to repeatedly make our teachers and education officials, who are our human force in managing our resources, the least efficient and the lowest paid (of course, there are exceptions). And the production lines of our factories (I mean our schools) with inefficient equipment, and our product, which keeps our raw materials inside its production lines for 18 consecutive years, is not competitive and is not needed by the market, and we insist on continuing to work in the same way…
Is there any stupidity and blurred vision like this?
The factory is losing, and no matter how much you renew its mechanisms, change its contents, and spend billions on repeating the construction of similar factories, you will get the same result, but the loss will multiply.
Another example is like wanting to go to Alexandria and taking a train or car to Aswan. 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 where you do not intend… You will reach Aswan, not Alexandria…
Have you achieved your purpose??
Have you reached your goal??
Has your boasting about spending and effort and sweat on the means brought you what you want???
The issue, gentlemen, is not in the school because it is a means, a factory for learning and acquiring skills and knowledge, and we manage education but we do not strive to achieve the goal.
We, as officials and parents, are drowning in the means.
Unfortunately, everyone cheats and bribes (I consider private tutoring in systematic education for the masses as a bribe to obtain a certificate and has nothing to do with learning and knowledge).
And everyone screams about public exams and results, but no one looks at the goal…
The most important skills that young people need are the ability to work in teams, communication and contact skills, and the ability to adapt to change.
Added to them are leadership skills that many jobs need at various levels. This is in addition to digital skills and the use of computers and dealing with artificial intelligence, and knowledge of a second language besides Arabic.
Do not think that this is outside the scope of specialties such as medicine, engineering, law, and military colleges because these skills are needed by the doctor, the engineer, the lawyer, the officer, the teacher, and all specialties. There is no place in today’s work and certainly in the future for those who do not possess them.
Distance education and training have become a reality, without the need to buy land or rent buildings and spend billions, and micro-credentials (Nano degrees) appear that do not cost the seekers a lot of resources, and professional diplomas to raise the performance of employees as long as the students enjoy the necessary skills.
Higher education should not be thought of as a reaction to the current state of the job market, unemployment rates, or the condition of a profession at a specific point in time. However, it will remain the type of education that shapes the future and builds humans capable of creating development, not just filling the void of needs. It builds the person who creates opportunities and achieves them, not just benefits from them. It qualifies the youth and builds a balanced personality that respects differences and avoids extremism.
The education system that ignores the new developments and changes that shape tomorrow thereby ends its relationship or connection with the lives of the students and will gradually decline. Therefore, we must rewrite our educational institutions from before school to university to prepare our students properly for the future, not the past.
The issue is not in the curriculum that we fight over, but in building the personality within the educational institution, which is not happening now and will not happen tomorrow, except through living within the educational institution, with competitive sports, appreciating and practicing art, cultural and enjoyable trips, dialogues between and with students. Otherwise, the question is how to do this with 25 million students in our schools and 4 million students in our universities…
I confirm that we have a documented vision, and we have strategies for education, but we do not have implementation or performance measurement, and we are spinning in vicious circles from time to time until the education of our children has deteriorated in a terrifying way and sound values have leaked and negative values have taken their place.
Our problems are known and their solutions are known, and they are certainly not in the curricula that the community fights over. We can take what we want from the countries and experiments around us… Our problem is in the ways of implementing what the vision and strategy we follow say, until we have reached this decline.
I have dialogued with the new Minister of Education, Mr. Mohamed Abdel Latif, more than once, then discussed with him and his competent assistants, and asked for references for everything that is being done and proposed, and followed his focus on implementation and solving challenges on the ground, and contrary to the negative critical trend, I decided to support and help him because what he is doing deserves support and may be a qualitative leap in facing the decline in the level of non-education in Egypt, and it is the subject of my next article, which I invite you to follow.
Imagine that I actually see hope…
