In a stormy session on 28 December, MPs said that since he came to office in 2017, Minister of Education Tarek Shawki had failed to solve the chronic problems of schools, citing overcrowded classrooms, lack of teachers, crumbling school buildings, and high education fees.
MP Magdi Seif said most Egyptians had lost confidence in Shawki because of his “bizarre” and shocking policies. “Every now and then people get shocked by this minister’s policies which have made the lives of school students and their families very tough,” Seif said.
Seif charged that Shawki’s “shocking” policies come at a time government schools are in urgent need of 36,000 teachers. “Instead of solving this problem first, Minister Shawki took all by surprise by imposing a very difficult fourth grade curriculum in elementary schools, a policy which forced cash-strapped families to spend a lot of money on private tutors,” said Seif.
MPs pointed out that social media platforms have been rife with posts from parents complaining about the suffering of their fourth grade sons and daughters.
Responding to the criticism, Shawki insisted that the fourth grade curriculum “is excellent, and if families are afraid that their sons and daughters will not do well on the exam, I tell them ‘do not worry too much about the exams of the fourth grade’. I advise their sons and daughters to focus on learning from the information contained in the school books and understand them as much as possible.” He said that “if there is a lack of teachers in the fourth grade curriculum, let students turn to educational TV channels which teach the curriculum in an excellent way.”
Shawki complained that the surge of the coronavirus pandemic led to cutting the school term short. “The school season in Egypt is just 100 days, a very short period to study the fourth grade curriculum. We need at least six months to teach this curriculum,” Shawki said.
Shawki said his “reformist policies” were based on scrapping the old system of memorising and learning by heart. “We do not want students to learn the curriculum by heart in order to just be able to pass the-end-of-year exams. We want a new generation who can understand and gain information,” said Shawki, adding that “the objective of the new curriculum is to give Egyptian students an opportunity to learn what students in Japan and America study and understand.”
He said he began his reform policies by modernising the first, second, and third grade curriculum in elementary schools. “All the fuss I see right now about the fourth grade curriculum is because only two books in science and mathematics in this grade have many pages,” Shawki claimed.
Nasserist MP Diaaeddin Dawoud said Shawki’s policies for reforming education will never pay off as long as there is a lack of qualified teachers. “The schools need 120,000 teachers and even when the ministry decided to appoint 36,000 it backtracked because of a shortage of money,” Dawoud said, also complaining that what makes the new fourth grade curriculum very hard for students to understand is that there are no teachers who can teach it, particularly in mathematics and science.
Shawki noted that his ministry should not be blamed for the shortage of schools teachers. “We are not responsible for not hiring 36,000 school teachers because it is a problem of lack of funding and I think that you should direct your questions in this respect to ministers of finance and planning, and not to the minister of education,” revealing that “right now, we are in a dialogue with the ministries of finance and planning on forging a three-year or four-year plan that can solve this problem which is really critical to the education sector”.
Shawki said 323,000 teachers are needed at the national level, 126,000 of whom are in elementary education, 8,800 in technical education, and 163,000 in services and activities. “The state treasury doesn’t have the required billions of pounds to spend on hiring this big number,” Shawki said, urging MPs to exert pressure to exempt teachers from the law which makes it impossible to hire new employees. “Teachers are neither employees nor civil servants who will complicate the problem of bureaucracy in Egypt.”
MP Amal Abdel-Hamid also accused Shawki of squandering money on buying tablet computers. “This policy did nothing to reform or advance the agenda of education in Egypt because most schools lack adequate Internet infrastructure to be able to use these tablets, and it was better for Minister Shawki to employ teachers rather than buy tablets,” Abdel-Hamid said.
Ahmed Hamid Khattab, parliamentary spokesperson of the ultraconservative religious Nour Party, said “the experience of using tablet computers in schools proved to be a big failure as most students now use these tablets to watch pornographic movies rather than study and learn lessons.”
Shawki argued in a TV interview that computer tablets were necessary to connect students with the 21st century. “It is bad that some say students use these tablets to watch porno movies, as everywhere people, including students, now have private mobile phones,” Shawki replied.
MP Amal Zakaria complained of the exorbitant fees of private schools. “Though families have asked Minister Shawki several times to solve this problem, he did nothing, giving private schools a free hand to double fees,” Zakaria said.
Lawmakers also accused Shawki of eliminating the idea of free education in Egypt. Although the constitution states that education is free for all classes in all stages, they said the principle does not exist on the ground, and that the rich are now the only people who can give their children a good education.
MP Ali Dessouki accused Shawki of ignoring the problem of overcrowded classrooms.” In the new school year, a classroom has between 60 to 85 students, and in 10 years this number will increase to 130 students a class,” Dessouki said.
Shawki said the problem of overcrowded classrooms goes back to the fact that the number of students in Egypt is dramatically increasing every year because of the runaway growth in population. “The number of school students increased by five million in the last few years, not to mention that we do not have land to build new schools that can accommodate this huge number of students.”
MP Abdel-Nasser said the Education Ministry should be held responsible for the poor quality of meals offered to students in government schools. “Several students in a number of governorates were taken to hospital last month after eating poisoned school meals,” Abdel-Nasser alleged.
Shawki said his ministry was not the institution responsible for distributing meals to school students. “If some have complained that some school students ate ‘poisoned school meals’ last month, they should direct these questions to the Ministry of Health,” said Shawki, adding that “we do not have official reports about ‘poisoned meals’. These meals are provided to as many as 12 million students and we do not have any official reports that any of the students were poisoned because of these meals,” Shawki stated.
MPs also called Shawki’s decision to cancel the division of third year in high schools into science and mathematics as “bizarre”, pointing out that it would place high school students under heavy financial pressure because they will be forced to study a large number of subjects and pay a lot for private tutors.
At the end of the debate, the speaker said as many as 140 questions had been directed to Shawki about education policies and his responses will be referred to the House’s Education Committee which will file a report.
*A version of this article appears in print in the 6 January, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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