Education in Egypt is a complicated issue. The education minister’s surprise visit to the Kholafaa el-Rashideen School in Helwan, where he caught teachers and school administrators "red-handed" in a state of chaos, is a trend that we welcome. For a long time we haven’t seen any Egyptian official as keen on tackling issues of negligence and corruption as the current minister.
However, the chaos that the minister has witnessed first-hand is symptomatic of the corruption permeating the entire education process–which must be addressed at the top of the education pyramid.
The minister’s decision to indiscriminately transfer all teachers along with the school administration team to far-off schools in southern Egypt without first investigating the incident is questionable. Besides, why punish those living in Upper Egypt by sending them incompetent staff?
Modern management techniques suggest that the root causes of a problem should first be identified in order to find a practical and achievable solution. In our case, though, the minister’s decision could make 107 Egyptian families homeless and will not solve the problems of education.
Let’s try to uncover the reasons behind corruption in the education system.
First: High-ranking officials in the education ministry have been involved in deals worth millions of pounds. Monitoring authorities should go after these criminals.
Second: After the earthquake in 1992 a number of schools crumbled, even though many of them were only recently built and some not yet even finished. At the same time, much older schools, built at a time when there were still scrupulous people in charge, stood firm. The contracting companies, engineers, consultants, and technical committees that approved those buildings which are now destroyed should have been questioned and punished severely.
Third: If Education Minister Ahmad Zaki Badr ever decides to make a surprise visit to the education ministry’s storehouses, he is bound to discover shocking truths about schoolbooks and their educational content. By probing further, the minister is also likely to uncover bitter truths about book publishers and the profits they make.
In the past, national newspapers willingly turned a blind eye to corruption in the education ministry, fearing that any attempts at exposure would jeopardize their publishers’ fixed shares from schoolbook profits. Under former education ministers, some newspapers were even threatened to be denied payment if they disclosed any information about corruption. Journalists could be fired or transferred if they ever harmed the reputation of the education ministry.
Fourth: Egyptian publishers have repeatedly expressed their desire to upgrade school syllabuses by allowing experts to put together new curricula or by replacing the current curricula with better ones from Japan or Europe. Their calls fell on deaf ears.
Egyptian artists have also been persistently excluded from designing the layout and illustrations for schoolbooks, which have instead been done by people much less capable. One official at the ministry was even known to insist on drawing her own mediocre illustrations in order to get paid for doing the job!
I have more to say, but I’m afraid the problems of education need much more space to be discussed in adequate detail.
Translated from the Arabic Edition.
