A tales of 2 countries

The following article from the Economist is posted as a comment by a reader and I thought it would be good to have it posted here. The story sounds familiarAre we going that direction? Your guess is as good as mine:

From recent Economist magazine:

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. .. 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 Egypts (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, Egypts population has nearly tripled.

back in the 1960s Egypts 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.

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.

South Korea an! d Egypt differ in another important respect. Fifty years ago, when South Koreas adult literacy rate was already 71%, Egypts trailed at a dismal 25%. With 72% now, Egypt has only just passed South Koreas level of 1960. That has had serious repercussions. According to a government-commissioned study, one reason why poverty has endured, despite Egypts 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.

It is not merely a question of literacy. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Egypts 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.

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.

Egypts failure to educate its people is not due to lack of effort. The countrys first mode! rn schoo ls 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 Egypts 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 Egypts 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 high est-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.