The answer to this question is both normative and empirical/historical. It is normative because, to answer it we must have a notion of an ideal benchmark of what constitutes a fair education system, against which we can evaluate ours. It is historical/empirical because we need to understand the historical evolution of the system in order to judge the fairness of its present condition.
An ideal system should be open to all children regardless of their social background. Sorting, or grouping of students based on their academic ability (e.g., test scores), is permissible only at later stages of education. However, I document that the Egyptian education system has not come close to this benchmark. This is, I argue, due to the systematic exclusion of the masses from the political process. The Egyptian state&rsquo;s traditional reliance on top-down reforms to establish legitimacy for dictatorships (even if out of a proclaimed genuine belief in egalitarianism under the post-1952 regime) has proven to be unsustainable, as it quickly transforms into a system that serves the interests of the elites.
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">What constitutes a fair education system?</h3>
From a normative stance, a major criterion when evaluating the fairness of Egypt&rsquo;s education system is its provision of equal opportunities for all children. This can be defined as the degree to which access to, and promotion along, the educational ladder is inclusive/open to the masses, as opposed to exclusive/closed to the masses. Under a fair system, elementary schools should be open to all children, regardless of their social background, religion, race, color, or any other characteristic that is not correlated with ability. One can argue further that elementary schools should be open regardless of ability, as children at this early stage of their lives are still too young to have developed &ldquo;irreversible&rdquo; ability traits.
After the elementary stage, sorting of students across schools may be permissible, but it should be based on academic ability (e.g. test scores, among other criterion) alone. The &ldquo;timing&rdquo; of this post-elementary sorting-on-ability is a matter of debate. In my view, sorting of students should be postponed to secondary school or even university, because, a fair system should give children more than one chance to improve their academic performance.
Another issue is the &ldquo;intensity&rdquo; of this sorting. Some argue that students should be sorted across &ldquo;academic&rdquo; and &ldquo;vocational&rdquo; tracks, each leading to different educational trajectories. A system where sorting does not separate students across different tracks is probably fairer, as it allows students more than one chance to improve their academic performance. Under the latter scenario, students may still be sorted across schools based on academic performance but within a single (necessarily, academic) track. Historically, many Western European systems chose vocational-academic sorting, whereas North American systems were more forgiving, choosing a single academic track.
Many would reject this benchmark, however. A first group would argue, perhaps correctly, that &ldquo;equality of opportunity&rdquo; in itself is not sufficient to achieve fairness. People are born with immense socioeconomic differences and, hence, focusing on mere equality of opportunity without actively seeking to redistribute resources to the poor and disadvantaged will result in the persistence of these differences. While I agree with this viewpoint, I think it boils down to how we define equality of opportunity. To truly achieve equality of opportunity, we must provide more resources to the disadvantaged.
A second group would ideologically reject this normative benchmark to begin with. According to this group, mitigating inequality should not be the primary goal of the policymaker. Those who hold this view often cite religion or any other moral value system that legitimizes innate differences and their persistence, although their reasoning is self-serving at its core. Dealing with this group is admittedly more difficult. Value disagreements are difficult to solve using logic or empirical evidence. To my mind, one way to deal with this group is to advocate for education for the masses because of its positive spillover effects (alternatively, avoiding the negative spillover effects of non-education). Another way is to say that I do not need to convince this group, and instead focus on convincing the poor (and not the rich) of the importance of education, so that they can pose a threat of revolt if their goal is not achieved.
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">How far is Egypt&rsquo;s educational system from this benchmark? </h3>
The state-sponsored narrative
Historically, the degree of inclusiveness of Egypt&rsquo;s education has been the subject of conflict between social classes since (at least) the advent of Mehmet Ali, Egypt&rsquo;s Ottoman autonomous viceroy, to power in 1805. A widely held narrative argues that the masses benefited from Mehmet Ali&rsquo;s educational reforms, but were then excluded from education as European influence intensified. The situation was only reversed in 1952, as the post-1952 military regime provided free education to the masses.
This narrative is nationalistic at its core and somewhat represents the official post-1952 state view of history in Egypt. It blames Egypt&rsquo;s educational dilemma on colonization and credits the postcolonial regime for social justice--a narrative largely endorsed in various degrees by ordinary Egyptians. &nbsp;Its empirical foundation is based, for one, on the dichotomy of the colonial educational system, when colonial modern schools served the elites, and pre-colonial traditional schools served the masses. For another, it is based on the quest for mass education that was the major pillar of the postcolonial regime.
While the first claim is largely true, the second is not precise. On the first claim, Egypt&rsquo;s colonial education was indeed a two-tier system. On the one hand, there were the modern schools that enrolled the elites, and increasingly after 1923, included &nbsp;the urban middle classes. At the bottom of this ladder were the primary (ibtida&rsquo;i) schools, which qualified their graduates for secondary schools and universities. On the other hand, most masses resorted to the elementary (awwali) schools. These were introduced in 1916 as a modernized version of the centuries-old religious elementary schools (kuttabs). However, unlike graduates of ibtida&rsquo;i schools, awwali graduates were not allowed to enter secondary schools and universities unless they transferred first to an ibtida&rsquo;i school, or alternatively, upon passing a special examination introduced in &nbsp;1945 (Saleh, 2016).&nbsp;On the second point, the key law that unified the two-tier system was introduced by Taha Hussein in 1951 and not by the post-1952 regime. Under this law, awwali schools were simply re-labeled as ibtida&rsquo;i schools. After that, the post-1952 regime implemented further reforms that completed the unification process.
A critique of the state-sponsored narrative
The state-sponsored narrative is based on two misconceptions. First, the elitist tendency of the pre-1951 two-tier system and the exclusive &ldquo;non-meritocratic&rdquo; nature of admission to modern schools were not introduced by British colonization. Instead, elitism had been deeply rooted in Mehmet Ali&rsquo;s education system. Novel, individual-level data from Egypt&rsquo;s unpublished population census in 1848 (Saleh, 2013) reveal that the share of students who were enrolled in Mehmet Ali&rsquo;s public modern schools was extremely small and mostly limited to Cairo.
This leads to the second misconception, which is based on the hypothesis that the postcolonial system was inclusive. However, in reality, the postcolonial regime had quickly re-introduced exclusive elements into the system. New foreign schools were soon created in the 1970s and expanded in size over the following four decades. Being fundamentally exclusive in nature, they were mainly designed to serve the elites and turn their ex ante privilege, which is hard to justify on moral grounds, into a meritocracy-based privilege that is easier to defend and justify.
Another example of the system&rsquo;s non-meritocratic nature is the sorting of students across academic and vocational tracks starting from the preparatory school stage. In principle, &nbsp;sorting is based on ability; nonetheless, given the huge differences in the standard and quality of elementary schools, it boils down to a sorting based on social background.
A third example is the admission policies to private universities, which are primarily based on financial ability, and only secondarily on ability. This practice has been extended to public universities that increasingly opened English- and French-language sections with higher tuition fees. This stands in sharp contrast to top universities in Brazil, India, and China, with more comprehensive and merit-based admission criteria. This means that the current debate about &ldquo;free education&rdquo; is actually about the sorting mechanism; what opponents of free education want is sorting by social background, but they cannot say so openly, so they mask their elitism with a demand for sorting by &ldquo;ability&rdquo;.
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Can the system be reformed? </h3>
Meritocracy-based education system reforms have been adopted in several countries in two forms. The first was by dictatorships seeking economic growth and a proclaimed egalitarian system, such as Eastern European communist regimes in the 20th century. The second by democracies, as was the case in 19th century Western Europe when the masses posed a credible threat of rebellion; thus, resulting in the extension of the franchise (right to vote) to the poor. Egypt&rsquo;s history shares both examples; whereas Taha Hussein&rsquo;s 1951 reform was a legacy of the 1919 revolution, the post-1952 dictatorship-sponsored reforms were introduced by the military on egalitarian grounds. The latter, however, usually depend on the ideological inclinations of the ruler and are limited by the systematic exclusion of the masses from the political scene. The inclusion of the masses in the political process is, hence, the only sustainable way to move forward.
<hr>
References
<ul>
<li dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify;">Saleh, M. &ldquo;Public Mass Modern Education, Religion, and Human Capital in Twentieth-Century Egypt.&rdquo; Journal of Economic History, 2016, Vol. 76 (3), pp. 697&ndash;735.</li>
<li dir="ltr">Saleh, M. &ldquo;A Pre-Colonial Population Brought to Light: Digitization of the Nineteenth-Century Egyptian Censuses.&rdquo; Historical Methods, 2013, Vol. 46 (1), pp. 5-18.</li>
</ul>

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