248 A Short History of the Middle East
which the forming of character and a broad understanding of the
world about them has been neglected in favour of a superficial in-
struction administered mechanically by teachers whose own
educational attainments are still often inadequate. Education is
directed far too much merely to the passing of examinations calling
for text-book knowledge learned by rote, rather than to the cultiva-
tion of original thinking and the exercise of the critical faculty; and
the ultimate goal of such education being safe employment in a
government office,1 not the moulding of an intelligent citizen of
sound character and ability to perform a useful function in the
community, what has been learnt tends to be discarded thankfully
as soon as the final examination has been left behind. Cairo
University students have in recent years gone on strike, and even
overturned and set fire to trams, in protest against the raising of the
examination pass-standard; and attempts by parents to bribe
examiners in order to get a backward candidate passed are not
uncommon. Even in the most advanced countries, of course,
education tends to lose sight of its true function on account of the
inhibiting effect of the examination-system; but this defeat is felt
with particular acuteness in the Middle East, where the quality of
education is further impaired by the crude and excessive national-
ist content of much historical and cultural instruction.
The present younger generation, having imbibed more formal
instruction than its parents, and being drawn from a wider and
more comprehensive social background than the wealthy elder-
statesmen, resents the fact that the latter have thus far enjoyed the
fruits of political power, an exclusiveness for which foreign im-
perialism can no longer, as formerly, be everywhere blamed. They
accuse their rulers, with much justice, of corruption and family-
partiality; but it is questionable how far their indignation is
genuinely moral, and how far they are moved by the fact that they
themselves are not the beneficiaries of these malpractices. Forced
by their education into a bottle-neck in which there are far fewer
desirable administrative or professional posts than candidates for
them, and unfitted for commercial careers in competition with
Europeans, they are driven to seek the patronage of the political
leaders; and those who fail in this rigorous competition tend to
1 Although Iraq has already rather more lawyers than it can hope to employ,
1,000 youths entered the Law School in 1946. (Times Baghdad Correspondent.
25 June 1947.)