The contested terrain of educational reform in Egypt

Abstract

The events that have been shaping the world since 9/11/2001 have brought into sharp focus democratization and governance issues in the Middle East, issues which are themselves critically intertwined with questions of culture. International aid is highly controversial. It is already deemed by supporters to be a means for positive transformation, while opponents view it as a source of increased foreign control and domination. These controversies increasingly occupy centre stage of domestic politics in Egypt. Nowhere are the debates around culture more heated, however, than in the domain of education. In fact education has been recognized as a fundamental agent of social and economic development and poverty alleviation in developing countries and has attracted increased attention from the Bretton Woods1 institutions (the World Bank and Intentional Monetary Fund) as well as international development assistance agencies since the 1990s. The international commitment for the Education For All (EFA) objectives was first launched in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990 ‘to bring the benefits of education to every citizen in every society.’ International consensus for the EFA objectives was re-confirmed in Dakar, Senegal in April 2000 and again in September 2000 (World Bank, 2009). Egypt has been among the countries that receive significant amounts of international development assistance throughout the past three decades and has evidently been affected by international development assistance trends. Along the general trends, focusing on issues of social welfare and sustainable development and placing education as a corner-stone for achieving the United Nations’ unanimously agreed upon ‘Millennium Development Goals,’ basic education attracted significant attention from the donor community in Egypt. Various programs addressing educational reform in Egypt have been planned and implemented by several international assistance agencies, both bilaterally and multilaterally, during the past two decades (EU Commission in Egypt and World Bank internal document, 2002). The failure or success of international development assistance (in its multilateral and/or bilateral forms) has engaged public discourse in Egypt for many years and the debate was often oriented towards the conspiracy theory, claims regarding the corruption of the government and/or development agencies, or local cultural values that get in the way of reforms. In this chapter, I argue that the successful implementation, internalization and sustainability of education reforms supported by international development assistance is highly conditioned by the social, cultural and political contexts. I briefly review the provision of development assistance to Egypt during the past two decades, its political motives, and how conspiracy theories originate and spread in the context of educational policies. I also more specifically examine how conspiracy theories played out in the case of the Center of Curriculum and Instructional Materials Development funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the 1990s. This chapter capitalizes on a comprehensive research exploring the impact of international development assistance on education policy making in Egypt discussed extensively in my book, Transforming Education in Egypt: Western Influence and Domestic Policy Reform (Sayed, 2006). The main argument in this chapter is that education reform programs operate in a climate of tangible cultural and political sensitivity and fear of the implications of potential foreign interference in education policy making. This hinders not only the implementation and internalization of programs but also the flow of potential bilateral assistance that otherwise could have been allocated to basic education. Lack of political participation as well as various political and economic frustrations tend to be projected on the public debate on education that is often used as the safety valve to release the dissatisfaction created by other public policy issues.