In response to the Ministry of Education’s decision to ban private supplementary books, legal adviser Mortada Mansour, who joined the legal defence team representing private publishing houses, made a striking statement: ‘Underprivileged students rely on supplementary books to understand the curriculum, as they serve as an alternative to the poor-quality textbooks provided by the ministry. If these books are banned, students will turn to private tutoring. If Badr is demanding intellectual property fees, he has no right to do so—he didn’t write history or mathematics.’
A sharp and expressive remark, encapsulating the crisis of educational content and its materials in a four-legged disaster—each leg as crippled as the next.
The first issue lies in the Ministry of Education’s timing and preparedness, both of which have been characterised by mediocrity and dysfunction for decades. The ministry suddenly decided to ban private supplementary books, using intellectual property rights as a legal pretext to intimidate publishing houses with the spectre of legal action. But was the ministry ready with an alternative? Had it considered the consequences of this decision? Or was this just another ill-conceived decree, taken without planning, left to fate to sort out?
The second issue concerns the ministry’s own textbooks, which require no lengthy critique—their shortcomings are well known to anyone who has set foot in an Egyptian classroom. These books are so uninspiring that students instinctively relegate them to a respectful spot under the bed, waiting for the call of the scrap collector eager to buy them by the kilo. While private supplementary books are hardly high-quality educational tools and have contributed to a culture of rote learning, they remain, quite frankly, a mercy—an alternative to the bewildering maze that is the official textbook.
The third issue is the rampant private tutoring industry, which the ministry combats with little more than toothless policies and hollow declarations. These efforts crumble at the slightest pushback, further entrenching the crisis and driving up tutoring fees. Parents, caught in the grip of this educational and social cancer, have little choice but to comply with its demands.
Predictably, the ministry’s poorly thought-out decision—lacking educational, economic, or social foresight—has led to the rise of a black market for supplementary books. Last week, major publishing houses openly defied the ban, stocking books in bookstores at staggering prices. A single book for preparatory or secondary school students is now selling for 60 Egyptian pounds, despite its official price being no more than 12 pounds.
Desperate parents have been queuing outside bookstores, scrambling to secure copies before they sell out, pleading with the Minister of Education, Dr Ahmed Zaki Badr, to resolve the crisis ‘out of mercy’ for them and their children.
And so we arrive at the fourth and final crippled leg of this latest crisis—and, indeed, of all educational crises in Egypt: the role of society itself, which actively contributes to the perpetual collapse of education alongside the government’s repeated failures.
It is a society that has reduced its children’s future to a meaningless piece of paper—a ‘certificate’ that declares a student is ‘competent’, and perhaps, one day, fit to earn 200 pounds a month when their turn finally arrives, if fate allows. Until then, welcome to the inevitable future of many graduates: a regular customer at ‘Ziko’s Café’ on the corner of their street, taking a break from their job as an itinerant salesman—a ‘freelance sales representative’—armed with an engineering degree, spending their evenings in the cafés of downtown Cairo, far from home.
It is truly baffling that parents always respond to every crisis in the same way: surrender, then more surrender, bowing to the pressure of an educational system that offers no real hope for their children’s future.
This article is originally published by AlBorsa in Arabic and later AI-translated by South Push.