This ambitiousness is the project’s strength as well as one of its most significant risks as it requires “unprecedented significant and sustained commitment and great political will and stakeholder buy-in”. The World Bank’s report on the loan granted for Egypt’s education reform states that the project “seeks change at the policy, system, and practice levels” and “intends to influence the entire education system at the central, directorate, district, school, and classroom levels”.
The Controversy over Education Reform in Egypt to avert the drilling of model answers in private lessons and the problem of leaked exams, to encourage students to learn and to think independently, and – most importantly – to abolish the concept of one exam that determines a student’s fate.
It therefore attempts to salvage what it can, i.e. Recently, Shawki announced that the new curricula’s development will be accelerated so that the effects of the reform will appear more clearly soon.Īs for the students under the old framework, although the curricula at the advanced levels of schooling have not been revised, the reform changes the assessment system by introducing year-to-year cumulative assessment and changing the testing method, as occurred in the general secondary exams this year. So far, the ministry has finished the curricula from the beginning of education to grade four in primary school. The new policy also includes the use of modern and interactive tools for delivering information. The new curricula will focus on the skills demanded and desired at the end of the education process according to international standards for assessment and education. This means progressively developing new curricula for all levels of education, beginning with kindergarten. Explaining his policy, Shawki aims not to salvage the old framework but to build a new framework on different foundations, namely comprehension, critical thinking, student centrality, practical application, career preparation, and the use of technology. He sees the key problems as reliance on memorization and rote instruction, and assessment via key, decisive tests that make the goal of the education process passing the test rather than learning. Shawki describes Egypt’s current education as a dilapidated framework on the verge of collapse and “a crime we committed against our children”. My conclusion situates this project in relation to the historical context and political dimension of the transformation and reformation of Egyptian education.Įducation 2.0: The Old Framework and the New Framework This article presents the key features, goals, and actors of the project to reform Egyptian education and its representation in political and media discourse as well as public debate. In 2019, it transformed into a national education project under the name “Education 2.0”. The new general secondary system and its philosophy and tools are part of a broader education reform policy that first emerged when Tarek Shawki became minister of education in 2017. This year, the tests were open-book, marked electronically, and consisted of multiple-choice questions ordered differently on each paper.
The latter follows a different assessment philosophy that aims to avert many of the previous system’s issues, such as cheating, leaked exams, and reliance on model answers. Not only was it the second year of the COVID-19 crisis but also the first instance of a cohort graduating under a new exam system. Most resources are directed toward private lessons to improve children’s chances of obtaining a high score and thereby accessing the desired faculty. The placement system determines this pathway and distributes students across universities based on their test scores. The bulk of families’ education spending occurs at the general secondary stage because it plays the key role in determining students’ higher education pathways. Every year, the announcement of the results of Egypt’s general secondary exams and the subsequent university placement process triggers much debate and controversy about these tests and the overall education system.
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