Egyptian Schools

[Goddess]

I thought this article in today's Gazette was interesting regarding the free schooling system.

Bucking the trend

By: Ramadan A. Kader

Dealers in buckets, brooms and electric fans are doing brisk business in Egypt nowadays. The reason? A cleanup campaign? No. It's because of transfers from one school to another!


You instantly wonder what these household implements and devices have to do with applying to have your children moved from one school to another. If you were familiar with the anomalies in the Egyptian education system, you wouldn't be at all surprised. Though the Egyptian Constitution states that education must be provided for free, in practice this is not altogether the case. Education has become a business with the Government vying with the operators of private schools and universities.

The tradition has been that, after the end of the school year and the announcement of the exam results, parents apply to have their children enrolled in new schools or to have them transferred to a school near their home. After going through the rigmarole of bureaucratic procedures, parents are surprised to be told by the school administrators that, if their application is to be accepted, they have to 'donate' something. The value and shape of this 'obligatory donation' depends on the social status of the area where the school is located. In poor areas, parents might be asked to 'donate' cleaning implements such as buckets and brooms. In middle-class areas, the demand could be for a fan or a wooden desk, and so on. What is more bizarre is that you don't get an official receipt from the school for whatever money you have forked out. Protesting or grumbling diminishes the chances for getting your child enrolled.

It is improbable that our education officials are kept in the dark about this seasonal extortion. Egyptians, most of whom struggle to make ends meet, understandably complain that they have to scrape every penny together in order pay for private lessons for their children throughout the school year. The top students in the Thanawiya Amma (General Secondary School Certificate) exams last month put our education system to shame when they unanimously declared that they had costly private lessons in all subjects. Education officials looked in the other direction and kept talking about the development of education, as the top students made this 'realistic' confession. "They do say that education is free, don't they?" a friend of mine once asked a school administrator. "Well, go to the officials and tell them to give your child a place in my school," the administrator retorted coldly.

http://www.egyptiangazette.net.eg

[Ebikatsu]

That's so sad

We went out for a cycle and then a swim to our club about 6pm last night and saw quite a few kids sitting at the tables with parents doing what looked to be homework or study. Lots of kids in the pool but so many sitting filling in exercise books Q&A's.
To be at this club you need to have money and these kids obviously were at the paying International schools and not the poorer government ones, and STILL they seemed to have to be doing extra study in their 'holiday time'

[Hurghadapat]

i did quite a bit of private tuition in Hurghada and it used to continue all through the holidays and on the weekends as well,sometimes felt sorry for the kids as they hardly had any time for themselves but also often felt that a lot of it was the parents always wanting their child to do better than any of their friends children.The children i taught all had german mothers and the german community in Hurghada is a very close knit community so hence the competativeness amongst them.

[Ebikatsu]

I would have left home if my parents thought of giving me schoolwork in the school holidays!

Holidays are for fun, exploring, stealing rhubarb, and generally getting up to mischief