The Egyptian Problem

EDUCATION
in India, to train up young natives for employment in Government offices and administrative services. Nor have the majority of Egyptians yet got beyond the stage of looking upon education as the avenue that leads to Government employment. Unfortunately, we aUowed that conception to go on dominating primary and secondary education, and up to 1916 the award of a Primary Education Certificate sufficed to qualify its recipient for appointment to Government service. " Many parents/' the Educational AdvisSr confessed in his Report for 1913, " were thereby led through mistaken pride to send their children to Primary Schools without any hope of continuing their education beyond that stage, in the belief that they would thus open to them a career of reputed respectability in an office. Large numbers of youths were thus diverted from their natural career in agriculture or industry, and found themselves eventually, on completing the Primary course or after failing to complete it, without any prospect of obtaining the kind of employment that they hoped for, and estranged from their own surroundings and parental influences.5' The remedy that was devised was to abolish the Primary School Certificate examination and substitute for it an Entrance Examination, known as Part I, for admission to Secondary Schools. This remedy only aggravated the evil, for it simply provoked a rush for this Entrance Examination, which has led to a tremendous overcrowding of the old schools and the opening of a large number of new private schools of a very low type, and to the steady deterioration of secondary education itself.
During the absence in England of the late Educational Adviser his locum tenens published a Report on the results for the last ten years of the Secondary School examinations which suddenly poured a flood of lurid light on to the dark places of the system. It showed up the absolute worthlessness of most of the Egyptian " private " schools and exhibited the Government schools as only some degrees better. In the examinations known
Madvisers, and his primary object undoubtedly was, just as ^s Macaulay'srous response from the Egyptian 1