Every June, the picture is repeated. Hundreds of high-school students fill up every empty corner in parks, crowd the benches on the coast road along the Nile, or loiter in the stairwells of apartment buildings in slum neighborhoods or on dirt paths on the fringes of villages. They hold textbooks and notebooks and are energetically preparing for their matriculation examinations.
As in previous years, the students who have finished writing some of their exams are already loudly complaining to their ministry of education: "The exams were too hard, too complex and too long. We did not have enough time to finish them. And – what is most important – we were asked to provide explanations for which we had not prepared ourselves."
The students' complaints are mainly aimed at exams in which they are asked to express their own opinions, instead of providing a ready-made answer they learned by rote. "It is high time that Egyptian high-school students knew how to answer questions logically and think independently, instead of learning things by rote," said Egyptian Minister of Education Dr. Hussein Kamel Bahaa Eddine's in response.
Over 16 million Egyptian teenagers will complete their secondary-school studies this year. Judging by the statistics of previous years, less than 10 percent of these young people will earn the high grades needed for admission to institutions of higher learning. Two years ago, there was a hue and cry in Egypt when it was learned that the number of top students was particularly high. It was then alleged that the ministry of education had paved the way for this scholastic success and that the number of high-scoring secondary-school graduates was simply unrealistic.
The ministry was accused of having falsified the grades to meet the aims of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who had declared that education was a supreme national goal. Thus, those who are able to produce the largest number of successful high-school students are faithfully endeavoring to reach the president's goal.
However, on the other hand, someone has to provide classrooms for these students. Egypt's 16 universities (12 of them government-owned, and four privately owned) cannot handle the immense numbers of eligible students and this has generated tremendous pressure. This pressure is felt principally by parents who generally turn to private tutors in order to prepare their children for the future.
According to unofficial estimates, the private tutorial industry in Egypt is worth close to $5 billion (approximately NIS 15 billion) annually. An average Egyptian family spends between 15 and 25 percent of its income on private lessons. Although Egypt allocates some 6.5 percent of its gross national product (GNP) to education, the parents are furious over the way this funding is distributed. A year ago, for example, the investment in university students was increased by more than 70 percent as opposed to only a 20-percent increase in the investment in high-school students. Moreover, the investment in education is not keeping apace with the rate of natural increase of the country's high-school student population, and each year, the level of services decreases. Teachers in Egypt are earning less, and since they are being forced to moonlight (which, in some cases, means to tutor privately), they are tired or unable to concentrate when they come into their classrooms in the morning.
No job guarantees
The Egyptian government has built model schools – state-of-the-art facilities supplied with the latest equipment. Unfortunately, these classrooms can serve only a fraction of a percent of urban-dwelling high-school students, and the situation of their counterparts in the villages is only becoming worse. As far as Egypt's universities are concerned, the situation is "ideal" because they are free to establish particularly high standards for admission. However, acceptance into institutions of higher learning and impressive grades earned there are no guarantee of a job once the student has graduated and received a degree.
Students who have degrees in professions that are much in demand, such as medicine or computer science, are admitted to the civil service. However, the thousands of unemployed university graduates in Egypt today represent a steadily deteriorating situation that is of great concern to the authorities.
Egypt is not alone in this predicament: A similar situation exists in most Arab states. Last year saw the appearance of the first report to deal with the state of human resource development in those states. The report, commissioned by the United Nations and compiled by an impressive group of experts from both Arab and Western nations, states that the level of investment in research and development (R&D) in the Arab states is among the lowest in the world. According to figures for the 1994-95 academic year, the Arab states invested only 0.4 percent of their GNP in R&D, as opposed to the 1.26 percent earmarked for that purpose in Cuba, 2.35 percent in Israel (in 1994), and 2.9 percent in Japan. The total number of scholarly publications appearing in the Arab states is only 2 percent of the standard number of publications in industrialized nations. For example, between 1981 and 1995, China managed to raise the number of scholarly publications per million inhabitants from one to 11. During that same period, the Arab states were only able to double the 1981 figure.
Even the links between educational communities in the Arab states are inadequate. Thus, research studies conducted in one Arab state are rarely published in another one. The Arab countries do not possess a common data base, so students engaged in research in a university in one state are not aware of the research of their counterparts in other states.
Worse than Third World
"This kind of situation simply does not exist in Western scholarly communities or even in many Third World countries," says a lecturer from the American University in Cairo. "Every Arab scholarly community lives in isolation. In fact, I would not be at all surprised if one day, someone living in one of the Arab states will claim credit for inventing the wheel. After all, how could that person ever find out that the wheel has already been invented?"
The scorn that can be heard in this lecturer's words is supported by the UN report, which notes that university students in Arab states are not familiar with the latest professional literature in their field. Instead, they rely on outdated sources. The budgets for new library acquisitions in Arab universities are miserably low, and there is an inadequate level of computerization even for transfering data via the Internet. In some cases, computers are used only by the university administration.
Modern technology, the report points out, parachuted into the lap of the Arab states like a black box – through the importing of data by foreign companies that did not share their information with the local population, while the Arab regimes did not take the trouble to acquire the new information and to enable their citizens to internalize it. One of the most serious consequences of the lack of a supportive climate for R&D in these states is a massive brain drain of skilled professionals. Only in recent years have the states started to undertake measures to reduce this brain drain and to encourage expatriate experts to come home. However, even here, the tendency is to offer the experts economic fringe benefits such as tax exemptions or the allocation of land for building their own home, instead of the creation of new, spacious facilities, the development of research institutes or the allocation of additional funds for research.
"We give prizes to those who know how to recite passages from the Koran," observes one Egyptian writer. "Those who have acquired some expertise in physics or computers are doomed to wait in line at the employment bureau until they are accepted for a government job that will enable them to earn a living by doing nothing and by driving a cab."
"We love to hang our children's university diplomas on the wall in our homes," explains one Jordanian intellectual. "These diplomas are a sort of confirmation that we are good parents. However, they are only pieces of paper that lead nowhere unless our children can be admitted to a research institute. In developed countries, the diploma is the beginning of the journey. Here, the diploma marks the climax of the journey – which we have obtained through our children. This is an individualized, economic perception of the substance of education. We do not have a national perception in which education is regarded as the very foundation of social, and thus economic, progress."
In a sarcastic tone, the intellectual rhetorically asks: "If our governments see to it that we can make a living, who needs an education?"
Israel as an excuse
One of the most alarming indicators in the UN report is the fact that the quantity of books translated into Arabic is low in comparison with the number of translated books in Western countries. Some 330 books are translated into Arabic per year in all Arab states – about one-fifth of the number translated in Greece alone. Another eye-opening figure – since the ninth century, only 100,000 books have been translated into Arabic.
The UN report, which is authoritative and contains a wealth of comparative tables, ranks the Arab states as among the world's most backward countries in the field of education at all levels – elementary, secondary and post-secondary. The report has sparked little reaction in the Arab press. One particularly vociferous response came from columnist Daoud Al-Sharian, in the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper:
"The report," he wrote, "points to the fact that the Israeli occupation has served as a catalyst for commiting dreadful mistakes in the area of resource management, as an excuse for disrupting research programs, for creating havoc in national agendas, and for prioritizing military development over human resource and economic development. Furthermore, in most Arab states, the Israeli occupation has served as a pretext for the sanctioning of oppression and for a lack of democracy – the excuse being that the most important need of the hour is to mobilize the nation, unify the ranks and protect national security...
"This grim picture [as painted by the UN report] is not even mentioned in the Arab media. Quite the contrary – all of the Arab media report tremendous strides in research, democracy, human rights and the war on illiteracy. And yet, the income of the average citizen in those states has been the lowest in the world for the past two decades; half the women in Arab states are illiterate; and 10 million Arab children do not attend school, but their employment has become a widespread phenomenon.
"We did not need this report," one Egyptian intellectual comments. "It merely contains more precise figures concerning a reality that we have known about for years."
A few days before the report's appearance, we visited the Al-Azhar Mosque, located adjacent to Al-Azhar University. This university has a student population of approximately 20,000 who are residents of all the various Arab states. Some of them were sleeping on the rugs after a long school day spent preparing for the final exams.
"Here is the next generation of our enlightenment," says the intellectual. "These people are highly esteemed in the Arab world. They knew the Koran by heart, as well as all the commentaries. They will also be on the front line in order to defend us from Western influences. From technology. And that is what they will be getting their prizes for."
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