In an article published in October magazine, titled “Those Who Have Withdrawn from the Age… And Those Who Are Up to Its Challenge”, my friend the author and historian Dr. Abdel Azim Ramadan, touched a nerve as he discussed Egyptian post-graduate students abroad. Ramadan’s article centered on the tendency of this expatriate community of future university professors to escape into the past and on their inability to face the challenges of civilization and culture in the advanced countries where they spend a good number of years. I have met many graduate students in various countries of Europe and North America and can concur that they are indeed, as Ramadan described them “fugitives from our age”. For the most part, they avoid the challenge of adapting to and absorbing these cultures and, instead, opt for the easy path of retreating into themselves.

In the Uk, most Egyptian post-graduate students live in Egyptian “cloisters”, quite detached from the golden opportunities available to them at the expense of the Egyptian taxpayer. In all probability, not one of the hundreds of Egyptians who obtained their doctorates from British universities bothered to read basic literary works as those of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Byron, Wordsworth or Dickens. It is also safe t bet that none of them became anywhere near as familiar with the treasures of museums as they did with the layout of department stores. University professors who lived in Britain for years have admitted to me that they never bothered to follow the political, literary or cultural events in that country throughout their stay.

In the US, I met several Egyptians preparing their doctorates in various branches of learning. Most had never really experienced American life, preferring to spend their years there in self-imposed isolation because of their inability to face the challenge of civilization and culture. Before meeting with a number of doctoral graduate students at one of the largest universities in the US, I had hoped to spend a few stimulating hours discussing American political history, cultural life and literature. But that was not to be. Instead, I was subjected to a series of monologues which reflected the speakers’ total detachment and withdrawal from their environment and their retreat into the distant past – and to the most fanatical and extremist trends of that past.

The reason for the cultural introversion of our graduate students abroad is, I believe, the poor educational and cultural baggage they bring with them. Forced to retreat into complete isolation, they seek refuge in exaggerated conservatism and extremism as an easy way out of their dilemma. Indeed, with their poor educational, linguistic and cultural assets, how could they accomplish what generations of their forebears had achieved? The generation of Taha Hussein, Tawfiq al-Hakim, the scientist and artist Hussein Fawzi and the two generations that followed traveled to the West armed with a solid educational and cultural background, and at least one or two foreign languages. They then acquire the best that Western civilization had to offer without losing their faith in the greatness of their religion and the glory of their past. Today’s students come back to Egypt nor richer than when they left, having concentrated on the study of one exclusive subject for the most part. As for the host society, its civilization and achievements in the areas of public freedom and democracy, the rich diversity of its literature and culture, its vibrant political life – these are of no interest to our M.A. and Ph.D. candidates, who are completely wrapped up in themselves and their own narrow vision, isolated and brewing ideas that belong to the age of darkness and obscurity.

In Paris once I sat in on a heated discussion among a group of graduate students, all of whom have since joined the faculties of Egyptian universities. The discussion was about painting and sculpture, and all those present pronounced both art forms to be works of the devil! Ironically, we were at that time only a few steps away from the city’s Latin Quarter, a district alive with art, literature and culture, and just a stone’s throw from the Louvre, where hundreds of the world's greatest paintings and sculptures stood in mute reproach to the astounding views put forward by people who had turned their backs on the age

Education for all:

 The above is by way of an introduction to the subject of education in Egypt today and the sorry state it is in. Egyptian education is a closed system, detached from contemporary realities and isolated from the common cultural heritage of mankind, without which no educational system can hope to produce individuals capable of enriching their nations. But where and when did this tragedy start, and who is responsible?  

To answer this, we must go back to the time when Mohammad ‘Ali made education available to all Egyptians.

‘Ali had always dreamed of making Egypt strong and great among the nations of the world, and he believed that this could not be achieved without an appreciation of modern science and contemporary culture. In that belief, ‘Ali was ahead of another great nation, Japan, which discovered the same key to progress a few years later and which has since been using it boldly and effectively. In 1826 ‘Ali sent the first of a series of delegations to France. It is thanks to those delegations that Egypt became so much more advanced than other Arab and African nations by the end of the 19th century.

These missions returned from Europe carrying the torch of knowledge and gave Egypt its first modern educational system—the system which formed Egypt's greatest minds at the end of the 19th century and in the first three decades of the 20th. Egypt produced more outstanding figures in that time than any other nation comparable in size or stage of development has in such a short period. Such figures as politicians Mustapha Kamel, Mohamed Farid, Sa’ad Zaghlul and Abdel Aziz Fahmy, artists, writers and poets Hafez Ibrahim, Zaki Mubarak, Sayed Darwish, Aziz Abaza, Al Sanhouri, and the renowned singer Um Kulthum and many more were products of the solid educa­tional system and culture sparked by the first Egyptian mission sent to Western Europe by ‘Ali in 1826.

Tracing the roots of the “enlightenment” which enriched our scientific and cultural life then is necessary to help us unearth the roots of the present sterility of our educational system and the level to which it has sunk. The virtual collapse of education in our country has gone hand in hand with a breakdown in the values system by which society is governed. The moral and cultural decline is painfully obvious. The situation calls for drastic action. Like a surgeon who would not hesitate to amputate rotting limbs so that the patient may live, we too must ruthlessly remove these festering wounds from the suffering body of Egypt.

The politicization of education:

What I said about the self-imposed isolation of Egyp­tian post-graduate students studying abroad and their refusal to taste from the host country’s opportunities is all the more true of their counterparts in Egypt. The latter have not even been exposed to other civilizations, nor to the challenge of new ideas that shock Egyptians expatriates in the West and cause them to retreat into themselves in what Arnold Toynbee called a “negative reaction”. In fact, their introversion is a defense mechanism against the challenges posed by the alien culture, and they nurture it with a misplaced belief in their cultural superiority and the sense that they can do without “Western” ideas.

Now I will examine the causes behind the deterioration of education and culture in Egypt and, later, will propose some concrete remedies.

I believe the main reason education fell from its promising heights to the depths of stagnation in which it is now mired is that the education system, both at school and, more particularly, university levels, was subjected to political currents. The subjugation of education of politics did not begin, as some might believe, in the Nasser era, but in 1925, when the old National University was transformed into a state institution and renamed the Egyptian University⁵¹. The controversy over Taha Hussein’s book on pre-Islamic poetry in the mid-1920s is a striking example of the attempts made by successive governments to subject the university to political orientations. The government of Ismail Sidqi (1930-33) was perhaps the most flagrant at that destructive trend. In the seven years preceding the 1952 Revolution, attempts to politicize the university were further stepped up, culminating in 1953-54 in what came to be known as “the purge”, when the post-revolution regime fired scores of university professors whom it suspected were not in accord with its policies.

Thus it was that although the process of politicizing education was not introduced into Egypt by the 1952 Revolution, it was the years that followed that saw the most blatant and painful examples of politics ruling academic life and trampling it underfoot. Despite the fact that violent repression disappeared by the 1970s, the harm had already been done. The Egyptian University, the pinnacle of the educational edifice, had become an inanimate corpse, trampled into subservience by politics.  My purpose here is neither to insult nor to champion any one group against another because the magnitude of the calamity is such that it no longer matters which leader, regime or era is to blame. A small consolation here is that if power had fallen into the hands of the Moslem Brotherhood or the Communists—who, it will be recalled, were a force to be reckoned with in the Egypt of the ‘40s—education would have suffered twice as much as it did at the hands of the new regime in Egypt in 1953-54 and beyond.

A second reason for the education problem is the decline in the level of Egyptian school teachers and university professors since they have become state employees. Once a member of an elite corps of scientists and learned men, a professor today is just one of thousands of government employees. The drop in teaching standards parallels the general decline in the level of public services in Egypt, a phenomenon that has grown out of the frightful imbalance between people's growing sense of rights and their diminishing sense of duties. This phenomenon is common in socialist countries. Things cannot be otherwise in an environment where workers are cushioned by a plethora of promises and freed from the constraints of such basic economic laws as that linking salary to production and the law of rewarding excellence and punishing error, and where labor laws encourage slothfulness and idleness while discouraging initiative, creativity, competition and motivation.         

I am confident that if we were to liberate teachers and university professors from the fetters of the civil service, we would break the heavy bonds that tie them to the present situation of education in our country and allow them to concentrate on improving the quality of their work rather than their chances for promotion.

A third reason for the situation is the alarming decline in our cultural life since it came under the thumb of politics. Education and culture are two sides of the same coin: if one declines, the other will follow. To understand what politics have done to culture in Egypt, it is enough to see the works of artists and writers in the 60s, or radio and television programs of the time, when politicization was at its peak.

The fourth reason is the indiscriminate expansion of the system. Education in Egypt is like a train: once a child reaches the age of six he or she can hop on board and remain there until the very last stop—the university degree. Not one country, either in the socialist or the capitalist worlds, provides education free of charge to every citizen wishing to benefit from that constitu­tional right. The fact is that no state, whatever its political orientation, can afford to provide free education from primary school through university. The only difference between socialist and capitalist countries in this respect is that while outstanding students enjoy this right in both cases, in the latter students who can afford to pay are allowed to continue studying even when they are not exceptional.

With such an indiscriminate expansion of education as that which took place in Egypt, it becomes impossible to maintain a balance between quality and quantity. Education is, after all, a service like any other, and the largesse of the Egyptian state in extending this service unreservedly to its citizens was, in­evitably, at the expense of quality. The damage could have been minimized with proper planning. However, the state did not prepare for increasing the number of public, technical and commercial schools, nor for the necessary boost in the number of teachers needed, nor for ways to generate productive and useful employment for the flood of future graduates. In fact, the expansion of education, like so many other things in Egypt, was a haphazard process born of a vague slogan about education being “the right of every citizen”. But noble slogans and good intentions never have and never will achieve success at any level.

To make matters worse, several factors combined to make Egyptians come to regard university degrees, and the government jobs that could be secured with them, with excessive respect, even reverence. At the same time, people began looking with disdain at technical and specialized vocational de­grees, which limits the social standing of its bearer. In addition to a shrinking private sector and the fact that most citizens are civil servants, and since all high public positions are held by university graduates, not to obtain a degree puts one in a category of social inferiority.

The deterioration of the private sector:

The decision to nationalize industrial and commercial enterprises in the late1950s and to limit the role of the private sector to basic commercial activities – a limitation which lasted until the mid-70s – led to a dampening of individual initiative, the only wellspring from which progress and achievement can flow. This too has an impact on the education system.

Some may argue that the spirit of free enterprise was eliminated from countries that opted for a socialist system—the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, Eastern European states—yet education in those countries did not reach the dangerously low level it has in Egypt. Still, it did fall well behind that in Western democracies, which supported a system of free economy and political liberalism. The disparity manifests itself most dramatically in the fields of technology, particularly computer science. It is no secret that since the computer revolution exploded in the 1970s the socialist world became totally dependent on the advances made by the West in this area. I recall a conversation I had with the Yugoslav economist and politician, Jan Stanovinc, a former minister and advisor to President Tito, who said that the fact that the socialist world exports raw materials like petroleum and natural gas to the West in exchange for computers and industrial and agricultural machinery sums up the real situation: that scientific and educational advancement in socialist countries is at least half a century behind that of market economies.

Others could argue that this state of affairs reflects a temporary historical phase. This argument might have been valid if the gap were diminishing; however, experts agree that the gap has been growing steadily wider since the mid-1960s. This is what lies behind the practical measures recently taken by the socialist world under the leadership of the Soviet Union, measures which tacitly recognize the existence of that ever-widening gap. What actually saved education in socialist countries from plunging to the depths it has done in Egypt is that those countries dispose of reserves of culture, progress and industry which place them in a far better position than Third World nations. Moreover, their acute conflict with the West bred the need to develop scientific research in military fields, in which they were indisputably competitive. But beyond the military-related industries, science in the socialist countries lags at least 50 years behind Western science, according to the most conservative estimates.

Intellectual oppression and the absence of freedom also played a role in the depressed education system before the present democratic experience was introduced. Although still in the embryonic stage, it is the only experience of its kind to have lasted for several years in Egypt without reversal. While skeptics point out that democracy as it is being applied is far from complete, the fact is that the freedom to express political opinions and to oppose the regime’s policies is unprecedented in the country’s history, with the exception of the 10 months of Sa’ad Zaghlul’s government in 1924. The vendettas aimed by political parties at one another prior to 1952 created an unhealthy climate which adversely affected the institution of education. Then came totalitarian rule, the one-party system and the single-imposed view, with all the accompanying, unforgivable violations of human rights.  Intellectual oppression prevailed, stifling all possibilities of freedom of research, particularly in the field of humanities – the very sciences that create the necessary framework and climate for progress, contrary to what some Egyptians, particularly technocrats, may believe. The great Arab Renaissance of the Middle Ages started as an Intellectual, literary and cultural renaissance in the 8th-9th centuries, expanding to embrace science only in the 10th-12th centuries with great minds such as Gaber Ibn Hayyan, al-Hassan Ibn al-Haitham, Avicenna, al-Razi and Ishaq Ibn Henein. The same is true of the Hellenic renaissance, which was led by such giants as Homer, Socrates, Plato and the Stoics, and followed by the scientific renaissance with Archimedes, Galen, Hippocrates and others. And the pattern did not change for the European Renaissance: first came the giants of art and literature in Italy during the 14th-15th centuries and in other European countries in the 16th-17th centuries, paving the way for the scientific renais­sance which lit up Europe in the 18th century and reached full maturity in the 20th. The reverse is also true: intellectual oppression and the absence of freedom breed intellectual obscurantism that kills creativity in the field of humanities, without which the seeds of a scientific renaissance cannot grow.

The final cause for the deterioration of education in Egypt is the erosion of the scholarly tradition and the demotion in the status of the professor under pressure of the economic privation and social chaos that has prevailed in Egypt during the last 40 years.

There was a time when a professor was the symbol of society's respect for itself. Venerated for his wisdom and his mission to society, a professor was someone who dedicated his life to teaching and educating the young. In return, society gave him the appropriate material and moral appreciation to enable him to pursue his mission. When the university and academic life in general was made subservient to political considerations, the professor's chair became just another form of government employ­ment. The vocation of professor lost its essence and mystique. The situation was even worse for school teachers, who were tossed around by the storms of political expediency, on the one hand, and those of economic need, on the other, since the state could not afford to pay them salaries that met the increasingly heavy burdens of daily life. Teachers also suffered from the intellectual vacuum that affected their profession, as it did all other aspects of life in Egypt. It was no longer possible to expect a teacher to be a symbol of self-respect and knowledge, and to be a conduit for knowledge. The values and the status of the professor and teacher had been shaken, and with them the very foundations of education in Egypt.

Is there a cure?

Such is the description and diagnosis of the disease. What of the cure?

 Before probing ways and means of reforming education in Egypt, we should be aware that the success of any attempts at reform hinges on the readiness of Egyptians in general and the authorities in particular to admit that the problem of education has reached crisis proportions and that radical reform is a must.