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Hope to work for the future

Hope to work for the future
Hossam Badrawi
I see great efforts and serious work to reform and advance the country and its youth. But the future depends on building the human being who is able to manufacture and preserve it. The entry point to influencing the mind and conscience of children and youth is education and culture in the educational institution and within the family, so I direct my next set of articles to this goal, putting my experience and expertise at the service of my country.
The ingredients for the success of any educational policy must depend on a number of foundations, the most important of which is that teaching and learning are continuous processes that start from birth until the end of life. However, formal education represents the most important of its links and plays the main role in providing the individual with communication skills, knowledge of language, mathematics, arts, computers, the ability to obtain information, self-learning, behaviors related to all of this, and the ability to adapt to future changes.
The development of education is a quiet and gradual process, and it should not happen suddenly, and it is necessary to pave the way for it between the implementers and the beneficiaries, but this should not hinder the importance of speed of movement in changing the ways of the central administration, educational areas and schools, modernizing their methods and developing and modifying their responsibilities. (Decentralization).
Also, the development of education in the Egyptian society should not be isolated, in any way, from the development taking place in the systems and means of learning in the whole world.
We must remember that the school is still the basic unit of education, the teacher is its living cell, and its management is its nervous system. His literary position in society.
Wisdom says that “the level of education in any nation is not above the level of its teachers.”
Every success must have a strategy, and in nations with a large population such as Egypt, it must be implemented gradually, and a critical volume of achievement must be achieved. It has a self-motivating force for the rest of society that makes it desire the same success. The gradual development must be legally protected.
Sometimes societies create challenges for themselves, drown in them, and consume the energy of the state, including the challenge of the bottleneck of secondary education, and overcoming it, in my opinion, is based on providing places for all students in higher education and making the supply wider than the demand. .
In order to achieve the vision of developing education in Egypt, we must take into account the importance of accurately defining the current state of education in a comparative perspective with what is going on around us at the regional and global levels, honestly, and not to satisfy oneself, or satisfy the political leadership, and that this be done within a framework of responsibility supported by the policy of A public, transparent, and realistically activated, decentralized education, within a known time frame, with constructive evaluation accountability from stakeholders and the media, and respect for agreed-upon values ​​that allow building the conscience of young people who are proud of their country and have hope for its future.
I repeatedly stress the importance of sustaining adherence to a declared reference and strategy, which is reviewed every number of years. In the vision of development, we suggested the formation of a higher education council to ensure the sustainability of the application, no matter how governments change.
Within the framework of this vision, we must shift to digital, as an integrated intellectual approach, in management, teaching, assessment and follow-up. Everyone has to think digitally, interact digitally, and acquire knowledge digitally, otherwise we will be out of the global competition.
Since the central examinations represent a societal challenge, the use of student assessment can be a means to support development rather than an end in itself nor a problem. Science confirms that the foundations and philosophy of evaluation do not change with the change of its method, because it depends on international standards, which are:
Validity: that is, the exam actually measures what is required to be measured according to the specified curriculum.
Reliability: that is, the exam gives the same results to students even if its methods change.
Justice, equity and equal opportunities.
We must move towards transforming student assessment to be a fair and comprehensive process that tests knowledge, skills and abilities for the school education stage and not to devote negative practices such as private tutoring and mass cheating in exams to get out of the predicament of low grades that lead to comparison with others and absolute judgment of failure. Or by converting mass fraud into a societal culture.
The perception of the concept of evaluation has changed, so we see it as a description instead of a performance measurement, a business file instead of a score for an instantaneous measurement in a specific time, a constructivist, rather than a judgmental.
In fact, success in exams is a sign of the success of the school and the teacher, not the student, because all students and students have the ability to succeed if they are taught well.
The Egyptian educational system, with all its components, suffers from challenges that have been exacerbated by the Covid crisis.
We must admit that the transition from vision and policy to implementation always faces new developments, and that we must stand in front of them, confront them, and discuss them with reason and objectivity, seeking to overcome them to reach the desired results, and we must share with the community in understanding these challenges, and persistence on policies Development so that we can move from the place where we stand to the place we are going.
Among the challenges are:
(First): Weak community confidence in the official government educational institutions, the emergence of an irregular pattern parallel to the educational system outside the school, and the large spread of private lessons.
(Second): Weak confidence in the main pillar of the educational process, which is the teacher, the decline of his social capacity, and the reduction of his powers in evaluating and evaluating the student.
It should be noted that the decline of teacher leadership and the decline of the enlightenment role of the school come at the forefront of the challenges that must be faced.
(Third): The low degree of language proficiency, including Arabic, the poor level of mathematics and science, and the reluctance of young people to specialize in them.
(Fourth): The volume of student activities is reduced or absent in many cases, with all its negative connotations
in building personality.
Fifthly: The existence of a large gap in the education curricula and their failure to pursue the acceleration in knowledge and the necessity of linking it with the needs of society and the labor market.
Sixth: The unprecedented geographical spread of schools in all parts of Egypt, including the positive availability, but it constitutes a major challenge in centrally managing them, and a great difficulty in raising their level and evaluating their performance.
(Seventh): The presence of more than one study period in about 20% of schools, and consequently the decrease in school hours, and the noticeable increase in the phenomenon of students’ absence, especially in the secondary stage, which marginalizes the role of the school in building the students’ personality and wastes the educational value of its existence.
Eighth: The pressure of public exams in their current form, whether traditional or the resulting new methods, due to the Corona pandemic and its impact on students and the Egyptian family, and the fact that it does not measure higher thinking abilities and creativity and creates a social and political climate of anger and a sense of injustice that is reflected in the increased loss of confidence in The credibility of educational institutions.
(Ninth): The absence of political understanding that deals with the gradual increase of forces resisting change and development, which impedes attempts to advance in the educational process and holds the central ministry alone responsible for bringing about and managing change.
Tenth: The infrastructure for digital transformation in education is incomplete for students in their homes, teachers in their classrooms, and school administration that is far from digital.
The human factor and the inadequacy of teacher training on digital interaction will remain a major reason for delaying the development movement.
I believe that the slowdown in confronting these challenges with a strong will and according to a announced integrated plan will directly lead to a negative impact on the rights of children and youth through greater marginalization of the poor, and the inability of education in its current state to support positive social mobility as a direct or indirect outcome of it.
It will also lead to the transfer of the most financially able groups to private and foreign education, inside and outside Egypt, which may create societal imbalance and large class differences.
Assigning the poorest groups more costs than their capacity for private lessons, and the failure of public educational institutions to benefit from this private spending, means many lost opportunities, unrealistic freebies, and a negative social impact on public sentiment.
The question is: Can we get past all of that?
The answer: Yes, we can.
This is the subject of my upcoming articles… including higher, technical, and Al-Azhar education, research and development.
The most important question is: how and not just what?