Schoolboy blues
The dismal realities of state schools are no secret but what, asks Mohamed El-Sayed, is it like for the children?
As the sky begins to clear of mist, at 7am, 11-year-old Ahmed Hazem is toiling under the weight of a phenomenally heavy schoolbag. Every morning, on foot, he carries his books the 2km distance to the primary school in Serapeum, a small village near Ismailia, for there is neither school bus nor lockers. By 8am, to the tolling of a rusty bell, he has joined 500 children from six to 12 years of age queuing up for five minutes of PE on the small dirty courtyard that makes up the "playground". Now they are listening to "the morning broadcast": a brief recital of the Quran, a saying of the Prophet, an adage and a news brief. They will salute the flag -- "Long live Egypt" three times, at the top of their voices -- before being herded to their classrooms by stick-bearing teachers. Another school day has dawned.
Built 40 years ago, Serapeum Primary School consists of only a three-storey building, two bathrooms, a small mosque and a canteen, as well as the aforementioned courtyard. Servicing some five localities, it has neither gym nor computer facilities. A fence built up where the old wall was disintegrating is the only recent renovation to the complex, if complex this meagre array can indeed be called.
Hazem's classroom, where I follow some 46 sixth- graders, is strikingly Spartan: low, uneven, often disintegrating traditional school desks uncomfortably accommodating three children each; scratches mark the grey-white walls, out of which electric wires jut out, bare. Only hand-made posters adorn the space: Quran, Arabic grammar, anatomical illustrations. I settle in one corner -- difficult to be comfortable with swarms of flies constantly attacking you. I notice the windowpanes are broken. So is the doorknob: this means that the classroom door must stay open all day -- a good thing, too, considering that daylight is the only lighting option, with the bare bulbs burnt out. The discomfort was only to become more intense, however, as the memorising routines began: nothing is allowed beyond listening and repeating after the teacher; no questions, no comments, nothing. To venture otherwise is ipso facto to subject yourself to abuse.
Hazem's second class commences at 9am. Automatically as the Arabic teacher walks in, students fish in their bags for their grammar textbooks. Suddenly as she notices Hazem bending over to murmur something into his colleague's ear, the teacher shrieks and he stops short. Noticing my presence, she explains that the insults are necessary: "They always make a noise in class." But even academic (over)eagerness is similarly rewarded. When he rushes to give an answer to her question, having failed to raise his hand, this is, practically, what Hazem is told, "Put a sock in it, otherwise it's going to hurt." At the next class, science, the teacher fails to turn up: when I ask his whereabouts I am told he is at the market buying groceries. He does arrive eventually, 20 minutes late, but only to tell the children to follow him to the laboratory -- two microscopes, one model of the human body and a blackboard, hand-written illustrations aside, in a setting no different from the classrooms. Pointing to the place of the heart on the model, the teacher exerts just enough pressure to tip it over; laughter disturbs the backbenchers' sleep.
And the usual insults aside, no sooner has the bell rung than the students clamour to the playground, with palpable relief, to spend their break chatting, eating sandwiches or running after each other. Beyond the occasional biscuit, the school offers no nourishment; the canteen dispenses fuul and falafel; the rare cheese sandwich costs 50 piastres.
I decide to take a tour of the premises: computers, an essential element in modern education, seem to be nowhere in evidence. Mohamed Hassan, another sixth-grader, tells me there are only two computers in the school: "During computer class, four students share a computer, the rest just watch. Most of us don't know how to use a computer, no." Nor is it just a question of facilities: the story of Youssef Yousri, also told by the subject, points to a similarly alarming mentality. When he was spotted trying to smuggle a love letter into the schoolbag of a female colleague, Youssef's entire class underwent considerable corporal punishment.
By the time they are finally released -- another arduous journey awaits many of these children -- the tolling of the bell sounds ominous. "I wish I could've gone to a language school," Hazem tells me as we trudge up the long road. "At language schools students learn to speak languages fluently, they have nice teachers and plenty of fun things to do. You know," he begins with a wry smile, "when I asked my English teacher the past participle of the verb to tear, she hesitated, then promised to look it up for me." Hazem looks deeply saddened by this. "She never did."
OFFICIAL STATISTICS: Paying LE25-50 per year, 15.5 million students (90 per cent of the total number) are enrolled in the state's 38,000 pre-university educational institutions, which employ 1.2 million teachers with a monthly salary of LE120 in addition to a yearly bonus of LE2,000. Four-hundred-and-fifty thousand new students join the schools every year, with the result that in 30 per cent of state-run classrooms there are 70 or more students at any one time. Out of the annual budget, LE17 billion is allocated to pre-university education.
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