Just being at school is a start
FIFTY years ago Egypt looked oddly similar to another country. It had nearly the same population which was growing similarly fast, the same low income per person, the same proportion of relatively few city dwellers to lots of peasants working tiny plots, and similar life expectancy. With dangerous enemies on their borders, both countries were weighed down by heavy military spending. Both were run by quasi-dictators, complete with strict censorship and a pervasive secret police.
Egypt has made a lot of progress since then, particularly in recent years. But the other country, South Korea, has developed far faster. It has become a leading industrial power, a technological innovator and a vibrant democracy. Its people are now five times richer than Egypt's (at purchasing-power parity against the dollar; at prevailing exchange rates the gap is far bigger), and on average live nearly ten years longer. The only measure on which South Korea lags behind is population growth. Whereas it had around 25m people in 1960 and now has double that number, Egypt's population has nearly tripled.
Such comparisons are doubtless unfair. The East Asian context is very different from the Middle Eastern one, and seen from the Pacific perspective South Korea's achievement looks less unique. Besides, although in retrospect that country's model of development has been extraordinarily successful, back in the 1960s Egypt's ultimately wasteful experiments with nationalised industries and state planning were widely applauded. Plenty of Egyptians remain nostalgic for the years under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, when toilet paper and soap were scarce but the shiny new state-run factories providing jobs for life had not yet rusted and Egypt held its head high in regional affairs.
Yet those statistics from half a century ago do reveal a few differences that may be instructive. In South Korea the number of children born per woman was falling fast. Population growth was slowing, propelling the country into a happy phase known as the demographic transition, when the population pyramid begins to shrink at the base and widen in the middle, causing a bulge in the working-age population and a relative decline in the number of dependants.
Egypt caught up with this trend only in the 1990s as its people started having smaller families after decades of high fertility. Its population pyramid has become dome-shaped and is slowly turning into a pear. Between 2000 and 2007 the number of dependants per 100 working-age Egyptians fell from 69 to 55, according to government statistics. That augurs well for the future and may help to explain why Egypt remained relatively unscathed by the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The biggest groups now are not children but youths aged 15-25. They are ambitious and hungry for consumer goods, often of the expensive and one-off kind needed to establish a new household.
South Korea and Egypt differ in another important respect. Fifty years ago, when South Korea's adult literacy rate was already 71%, Egypt's trailed at a dismal 25%. With 72% now, Egypt has only just passed South Korea's level of 1960. That has had serious repercussions. According to a government-commissioned study, one reason why poverty has endured, despite Egypt's rapid growth, is that too few people have the skills to exploit the opportunities available to them. Egyptian businessmen complain that a shortage of talented workers is one of the biggest obstacles to growth, second only to obstructive bureaucracy. Lawyers fume that it is not just too many laws and too few courts that tangle justice, but clueless judges and incompetent clerks.
What do you know?
It is not merely a question of literacy. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Egypt's high rate of traffic accidents, for instance, may be largely due to ignorance of basic rules. High fatality rates in hospitals reflect poor standards of training, accountability and hygiene. A 2008 study of public awareness of AIDS revealed that only 1.8% of women among the poorest fifth of Egyptians, and less than 16% among the richest, knew the basic facts of the disease. Men were better informed, but even so less than 30% of the wealthiest class were aware, for example, that someone might be HIV-positive yet look healthy.
Recent surveys also show that two-thirds of Egyptian girls aged 10-14 have been subjected to the traditional practice of female circumcision. This is down from 90% among women in their 20s, which suggests a rapid decline. But the persistence of the brutal and dangerous custom, despite an official ban and public-awareness campaigns, is disturbing.
A government survey this year found that, apart from school textbooks, 88% of Egyptian households read no books, and three-quarters of families do not read any newspapers or magazines either. Of those who do read, 79% concentrate on religious subjects. Perhaps more encouragingly, the study found that nearly three-quarters of youths aged 15-29 have used the internet, and almost half of them have read books on the web. But again, religious fare was the favourite subject, followed by sport, and only distantly by scientific subjects. Other surveys have found far lower levels of internet use.
Egypt's failure to educate its people is not due to lack of effort. The country's first modern schools opened in the early 19th century, far earlier than in most of the region. Free public primary education was introduced in the 1940s, but not widely available until after the 1952 revolution. In the following quarter-century university enrolment increased by more than ten times. The number of primary schools doubled, the number of students quadrupled and public spending on education swelled from 3% to 4% of GDP, a respectable figure by world standards.
Yet something went wrong. Before the revolution Egypt's schools and universities were few but their standard was excellent. The push to boost numbers came at the cost of a drastic fall in quality. Instead of following tested Western models, school textbooks were rewritten to emphasise “nationalist values”, scientific formulas and lists of facts rather than critical thinking. By the 1980s class sizes in government schools averaged more than 60. With student numbers in several big state universities up to six-digit figures, hundreds, even thousands of students were packed into lecture halls. Some of the better staff emigrated to Gulf countries, where salaries were many times higher.
Those left behind began to exploit an obvious market opportunity, offering private lessons on the side. This practice became so pervasive that by 2005 some 64% of urban students and 54% of rural ones resorted to private crammers in addition to regular schooling, according to Egypt's Human Development Report. A 2002 World Bank study found that private tuition accounted for fully 1.6% of GDP, and other studies suggest it devours a whopping 20% of household spending in families with school-age children. A big reason why families are willing to spend so much is that the education system relies heavily on national exams, not only for rating students but also for placing them in the various faculties of the state universities that still account for 95% of college enrolment.
Since the 1960s these have been ranked by prestige, with medicine and engineering accepting only the highest-scoring students. The humanities, including law and education, are left with the dross. In effect, this creates a tyranny of exams largely based on rote learning. It forces unhappy students into disciplines they would not have chosen for themselves and produces a chronic imbalance between the skills of graduates and the needs of the marketplace. Egypt has a surplus of would-be lawyers, slapdash engineers and scarcely numerate accountants but few trained librarians, architects or actuaries.
Rather slowly, the education system is improving. Whereas in the early 1990s nearly half of all children either did not even start basic education or failed to complete it, that proportion has now fallen below 15%, which suggests that Egypt could be reaching 90% literacy within a generation. In 2007 the government launched a five-year overhaul of basic education, including a sharp rise in teachers' salaries, better school facilities and a reworked curriculum. Another initiative seeks to give all high schools broadband internet connections by 2012. Many state universities now have specialised and sometimes fee-paying faculties, often in collaboration with foreign institutions; but even so the number of private colleges has risen rapidly. Private businesses, long absent from education, now sponsor scholarships and university chairs.
Egypt has, in effect, accepted that it runs a two-tier education system. It is skewed towards those who can afford to pay for the best private tutors or, better still, private schools, which are flourishing. Even in public universities, a startling 48% of students come from the richest fifth of society. Yet although the promise of a decent free education for all has clearly not been met, at least Egypt's better university faculties are again producing top-notch graduates, and publishers and bookshops have seen a surge in sales in recent years.
Historic comparison offers some cause for optimism. Egyptians' educational level now equals not only South Korea's in 1960 but also Turkey's in 1980 and much of western Europe's at the end of the 19th century. In all those places the threshold of 75% literacy proved a starting point not just for faster economic growth and human development but for political transition too.
The long wait Egypt
This article appeared in the Special report section of the print edition under the headline "A slow learning curve"