Every year, photographs of Egypt’s top high-school students fill the newspapers: confident smiles, certificates held proudly in their hands, as though Egypt were celebrating the birth of its next generation of elites.
We call them “the top students” with unquestioning certainty, as though their ranking on an examination were also a ranking of their place in life.
But have we ever stopped to ask:
Where are they twenty years later?
And were the people leading Egypt today—in politics, economics, science, and public life—the very same people who once ranked first in their classrooms?
Half a century ago, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put forward a disturbing idea: in his view, examinations are not neutral instruments that measure pure ability. Rather, they can serve to reproduce the existing social order, dressing it in the language of “merit” so that it appears fair.
A child who grows up in a home filled with books and is raised to understand the language and logic of examinations does not begin from the same starting point as another child who was never given that opportunity—even if the two are equally intelligent.
When the first child succeeds, it may appear to be a triumph of intellect, while in part it is also a triumph of circumstance.
This idea, when Bourdieu developed it in a European context, invites a distinctly Egyptian question.
We are a nation that has forged an almost sacred pact with the Thanaweya Amma, the Egyptian General Secondary Education Certificate, turning it into a single gateway through which the destinies of millions of young people are determined at one particular moment—a few hours in a person’s life that are expected to summarize years of diverse abilities.
But does this gateway really identify those who will go on to lead society?
Or does it, as Bourdieu might suggest, select those who are best at mastering the rules of the school game—not necessarily those who will go on to make history?
The few serious studies that have attempted to answer this question—including a prominent American study that followed 81 top high-school students for 14 years—reached a conclusion worth contemplating:
Yes, these students continued to succeed. But none emerged as someone who fundamentally changed the rules of the game or led an extraordinary transformation.
The researcher who led the study made an observation that deserves to be written in gold:
“Top students rarely become the visionaries of the future… They settle within the system rather than shake it.”
Those who excel at meeting the expectations of an examination often become highly skilled at following rules that have already been established.
Those who change the course of history, by contrast, have often broken a rule somewhere along the way—or refused to be measured by someone else’s ruler.
I am not suggesting that academic excellence is a flaw, or that hard work at school has no value. The matter is far more complex than such a simplistic conclusion, and too important to be reduced to a single answer.
What I am suggesting is that a society that ties the entire future of its children to a single examination, at a single age, according to a single standard, risks leaving potentially genuine leaders of tomorrow on the sidelines—simply because they were unable to reproduce the model answer, because their circumstances did not support them, or because their talent was not the kind that can be measured with pen and paper.
I raise this question today not to answer it.
The answer requires patient field research that follows the trajectories of top students over decades and examines the biographies of those who actually went on to lead society, asking where they stood in their classrooms.
Rather, I raise it to open a door that I believe has been closed in our collective consciousness for far too long:
Does our examination system identify ability—or exclude those who do not fit its preconceived image of success?
I leave the question hanging, hoping to return to it soon with something closer to an answer.
