Towards the end of 2000, the American University in Cairo invited me to speak on the nature of the educational reforms I wanted to see introduced in Egypt. In my lecture, which I delivered in the university's Greek Campus, I spoke extensively about the difference between a 'qualitative' change in an educational system and a 'quantitative' change. I said we had paid scant attention to the former because our educational philosophy continues to be based on the rote system and memory tests rather than on promoting creativity and dialogue [as opposed to monologue]. Education is not seen as an interactive process, but as a one-way street in which the teacher is a 'transmitter' of knowledge and the student a passive 'receiver' of that knowledge.

   In the first quarter of 2001, I was invited by Princeton and Colombia universities on the East Coast of the US and the University of California at Berkeley on the West Coast, to deliver a series of lectures to postgraduate students in Middle Eastern studies. In my lectures, I stressed the need for an educational revolution in the region if we want a scenario of peace (real peace based on international legitimacy and the principles of international law) and comprehensive development (economic, cultural, and social) to prevail. For all its complexity, such a revolution would be based essentially on a simple philosophy of instilling in students a set of values that I call 'values of progress'. 

   Since August 2001, I have devoted much of my time to developing this idea further. In a way, my interest in promoting the notion of values of progress provided an outlet for the frustration I felt at the way public debate in our society tends to degenerate into private squabbles. Any topic can spark off a furious controversy: Mohamed Ali, Taha Hussein, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, secularism, enlightenment, modernity, globalization or peace in the Middle East are equally divisive, splitting people across seemingly unbridgeable ideological chasms and entrenching them still further in their respective closed systems. The rules of rational and objective debate are spurned in favour of a dialogue of the deaf, in which the protagonists engage in mutual recriminations and insults, heaping abuse and accusations against one another.

   When I began looking for a subject that would not polarize society, or at least polarize it less sharply than has been the case with most topics, the only one that seemed to fit the bill was the notion of values of progress that I had touched upon earlier in several articles and lectures. Not a subject that can split society into opposing camps - Islamists versus non-Islamists, socialists versus capitalists - it is to a large extent non-ideological and, as such, lends itself to an objective and neutral debate that need not descend into the usual pattern of dogmatic intransigence.

   Perhaps this was wishful thinking on my part, a scenario that is closer to fantasy than to reality. But rigid patterns can only be broken by those who have the capacity to dream and the gift of imagination. With this in mind, some schools of modern management require senior managers to exhibit two concomitant characteristics which at first glance may seem contradictory: power of imagination on the one hand and a sense of reality on the other. In actual fact, however, these characteristics are not mutually exclusive and are often present at one and the same time in ordinary people. It is these individuals who make successful senior managers. I hope my dream that intellectuals and public opinion in Egypt today can deal with the subject of values of progress in a manner free of factionalism and preconception will see the light day. I hope it strikes the proper balance between power of imagination and a sense of reality, otherwise it will be nothing more than an exercise in escapism, a mirage to which I turned out of a deep sense of despair at the inhospitable climate for any reasoned and objective debate in our society today, where name-calling and stone-throwing have replaced logical argumentation.