By Peter Sachs
Surrounded by buildings in all phases of breakneck construction, and next to a yard filled with stacks of cement bags, the Nasr City headquarters of Raafat Khalid's non-governmental organization (NGO), the Cultural Civic Education Organization (CCE), is nearly impossible to notice on first try. It is little more than a four-room office marked by a small sign obscured by plants outside. The road is dirt, or at least there is so much construction traffic, the layers of dirt completely hide the asphalt below. The only open store on this stretch is a paint shop.
The setting is apt for the work Khalid is trying to do. A former first undersecretary for nine years in the Ministry of Education, he makes clear that his organization isn't about injecting Egypt with democracy, nor is it about revolutionizing elections. It is, however, very much about changing mentalities, so that children are taught about critical thinking and civic responsibility in schools. The process will take some time, he knows, but he's also confident that by working from within the system, he will be able to slowly but surely change the way people engage with the government. He is also certain that his approach will be far more successful than the work attempted by American organizations like the International Republican Institute (IRI), which work on party-building but sometimes encounter heavy resistance from local governments because of their involvement in politics.
All this, of course, is contingent on getting approval from the security police, something that he was promised verbally in early November but that had not formally materialized by the time this story went to press. The delay in approval has meant postponing at least his first training session, which had been scheduled for the last weekend in November.
"They (students) go out of the high school without knowing their constitution, without knowing their rights," Khalid insists, his booming voice careening off the office walls decorated with official commendations and medals. "Everybody pushes for the duties the citizen has ... but no one of the citizens gets back from the government what his Constitution [guarantees], what his rights are, and he doesn't know how Egypt is governed."
Khalid's definition of civics is probably different from what many other people have in mind. He says civics is about knowing one's specific rights in a society and how to take advantage of them, whether through voting, appealing an unjust judicial decision, or simply speaking one's mind. In other words, "[one] sort of pillar of civic education is to know and to act according to that knowledge," he says. Integral to civic education is being able to think crucially, to analyze arguments and to assess how solid they are. Having that skill allows people to constructively criticize society and to engage with other people in communities to solve problems, Khalid says.
But for many Egyptians, civics is not nearly this specific. There is a broad sense of the rights to which a person is entitled, but enumerating those rights is more difficult. And the duties and obligations necessary to earn those rights, like paying taxes, are even more ambiguous for many people. This is markedly different from many Western nations, in which people have at least an adequate understanding of what their rights and duties are, and what they can expect from the government in return for paying taxes.
Khalid's pilot Make a Difference program is his first effort to address what he sees as a chronic lack of civic education in Egypt. So far his funding is minimal, and he's drawing from his own savings and a $10,000 federal assistance award from the United States Department of State to bankroll his first four training sessions. For now Khalid's office is staffed only by himself and his two daughters, though a handful of other professors have given some money to help get the project started. The other people who will help run his training sessions have all agreed to volunteer their time.
CCE's main work will be in hosting regular three-day workshops for young Egyptian public-school teachers. They will start out small, with perhaps 30 participants and a handful of university faculty members facilitating the sessions. The teachers will be young, most of them between 21 and 25 years old, and they will come from high schools and elementary schools alike. To fit around weeks already full with teaching, the workshops will run Thursday-Saturday, starting with sessions fleshing out definitions of terms like "democracy."
The culmination comes on Saturday, in what Khalid says will have been the first mock conventions and elections held in the Middle East. Political conventions are large events heldin many countries in which members of a political party gather to share policy initiatives, shape new ones and nominate people within the party to run for various elected offices. Political conventions are a rarity in Egypt and many other Middle Eastern nations, so Khalid sees his planned simulation as a good way to introduce the concept.
Indeed, the state of many political parties is weak, owing to poor internal organization, misuse of funds and difficulties formulating policy platforms and sharing them with voters. While the Muslim Brotherhood has attracted a growing following of disenchanted Egyptians, many secular parties have very little name recognition, and have been unable to mount candidates of their own.
"I would bet you, if you go out ... [and ask] any of the laypeople ... how many political parties do you have? None. Give me a graduate. They will give you two or three," Khalid says. "We have 19."
Khalid worries that his mock political convention will be the most controversial part of his project. The idea is to split the participants into groups representing broad political parties, like liberal, centrist and conservative. After nominating their own "presidential candidates" in mock political conventions, complete with speeches addressing nationwide issues like overpopulation and unemployment, the day will move into elections. The candidates will have to present their platforms, and everyone will vote. The twist, Khalid says with a grin, is that after voting, everyone will have to justify their choices to the group.
The exercise is meant to get people thinking about their voting decisions. Are they making knee-jerk selections based on a politician's demeanor or a rumor? Or are they weighing the positions of all the candidates and picking one they agree with?
It may sound like a risky gamble, but Khalid is confident the entire exercise will go off without a hitch. Officials, after all, are watching what his program does. Though the Ministries of Education, Higher Education and Social Security have all signed off on the Make a Difference project, Khalid senses that there is still an underlying degree of unease in some quarters about what it will result in.
"They will look very thoroughly and carefully [at] how well the practical workshop will match the writing on the proposal. Especially when we talk about democracy, when we talk about the rights of the people, liberalism, and when we are doing these mock elections.
"But to be honest we will stick to what we have written down."
HARD WORK TAKES TIME If there is one person with the connections to pull off a project like this, in a country that only had its first contested presidential elections one year ago, it may well be Khalid. He spent 11 years working in the Ministries of Education and Higher Education and two more serving as an office manager for the Speaker of the People's Assembly. In short, he knows not only how things get done in Egyptian politics, but he personally knows the people who make many of the decisions as well. His connections don't stretch as far as the security police though, which have held up his initial training sessions, despite having them approved by the Ministries of Education and Higher Education.
He says when he worked in the Ministry of Education, from 1991 to 2000, he tried unsuccessfully to convince the Minister of Education and his aides to give civic education a higher priority in school curriculum. Since then, he chaired an Egyptian consultancy. And in that time his ideas have crystallized enough that even without any prior experience running an NGO, he has managed to secure the approval of the necessary government agencies.
Still, Khalid had some concerns about how authorities might respond to Egypt Today's interview. Several of his colleagues who are helping with the pilot project declined to be interviewed for this article because of how sensitive the topics surrounding the Make a Difference project are.
Dr. Nihal Famhy, a professor-at-large at the American University in Cairo who has also taught at Cairo University and the Sadat Academy, is one of those who will facilitate the seminars. Famhy's career has centered on working for and teaching about international NGOs. She currently serves on the Egyptian council for the Anna Lindh Foundation, based in Alexandria, a European organization working on improving cross-cultural communication.
"I am hoping that civic education will be able to be taught to everybody across Egypt and different governments - to students in schools, to teachers educating these students, to officials, to policemen - to all those who should know about their civil rights," Famhy said. "It is very hard, of course. It is hard work. It will take time, but it can be achieved."
Famhy hesitates to say how long, noting the length of the process the government is going through to implement human-rights education. But with the progress being made on that front, she thinks results from the Make a Difference project might be visible in six to 10 years.
"We have a role as citizens to help our government," Famhy said. "It is not only the role of our government to raise the level of education [and] to have a better life for us. We should have our contributions. Everybody should contribute whether with his effort, with his knowledge, with his time - whatever."
Unlike American organizations operating in Egypt like the IRI and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), which helicopter into areas and provide seminars and resources on mobilizing voters and running political parties, Khalid's plans take place entirely within Egypt, and they start small. CCE has only been in existence since late May. By the time this story goes to press, he will have conducted the first training seminar that will form the backbone of CCE's work.
Despite Khalid's wide-ranging ambitions for his project, he says he's steering clear of "party-building" activities like the IRI and the NDI have focused on, for one simple reason: Law 84 of 2002, more commonly called the NGO Law, forbids NGOs like his from interfering in political issues, and he fears that's how such activity would be construed. But ultimately, with the snowball effect Khalid is hoping to achieve, somewhere down the road he would expect teachers who know those he has trained to take an active interest in strengthening Egypt's parties.
After a controversy in May over foreign NGOs working in Egypt without being properly registered with the government, both the NDI and the IRI indefinitely suspended their Egypt programs. Both groups had conducted election monitoring during last fall's presidential and parliamentary elections. Francesca Binda, the country director for NDI's Egyptian operations, says while all of her organization's paperwork is in order, they have still not received their registration from the government so that they can start working again. "They keep saying 'soon,' and we are respecting the government's wishes not to be active," she says.
Linda Gates, a spokeswoman at IRI's Washington, D.C., headquarters, confirmed that their liaison left Cairo earlier this year, but was unsure if IRI had anyone staffing a field office here now. IRI's website lists future plans to help build up Egypt's political parties and to conduct public opinion research.
CULTIVATING CRITICAL THINKING Khalid has an anecdote he likes to use to illustrate the problems associated with not teaching critical thinking. It isn't about one specific experience, but rather a series of events he sees repeating itself across Egypt.
Imagine, he says, two girls who are best friends, starting second grade together. One is a Muslim and the other is a Copt. When Mary is escorted to a different room during religion class, Fatima wonders what is going on, and asks her mom that night. The reply is that Mary's family is different. How? They believe in a different God. But if Allah is the only God, how can they have a different God than us? Their God is inferior.
That's how the conversation goes, as Khalid tells it. It points out a potential roadblock in Khalid's work: reconciling the secular aims of civic education with a system of laws based on Islamic Shariah. Khalid doesn't think that doing so is such a problem, though.
"If your God is Jesus or your god is Allah, it doesn't make any difference in the principles. There are principles in all sorts of holy books," he says. In other words, nearly every religion in the world takes very similar views on issues like meting out justice, forbidding killing and adultery, and respecting others. Because of those common threads, there is no need to differentiate people based on religious orientation, just as there is no need to discriminate based on sex or ethnicity, Khalid says.
His well-reasoned and articulate responses turn into something of a stream of consciousness as he explains the breakdown that occurs as children grow up hearing such simplistic arguments and don't learn critical thinking.
"When you are raised and brought up in a system and culture whereby you have been taught - very young citizens, very young Egyptians, are drummed by their mothers and their fathers and their grandparents in their dear little ear about their religion - the difference in religion, and you come to me when you are 18 years old and 20 years old and you [are told, there is] no discrimination. What have you been taught?" Khalid wonders.
That's the crux of the problem Khalid is really after. When people finish with Egypt's public education system, many of them do not know how to evaluate logical arguments, look for inconsistencies, or weigh and reconcile two seemingly contradictory positions, Khalid says. Those are all important skills in any profession, and voters need to have them, too, so they can evaluate all the candidates before them.
Too many young adults here are dispassionate about politics, he says. It's not hard to find evidence of his claim, either. Among the 31.8 million registered voters in Egypt, at most only 23 percent, or 7.3 million people, voted in the 2005 presidential elections. By contrast, the United States' most recent congressional elections in November had a voter turnout rate of about 40 percent, and the presidential votes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo earlier this year both had turnouts in excess of 70 percent.
By the time participants finish his weekend seminars, Khalid hopes they will be thinking about what and how they teach their students. He hopes teachers will talk with each other about trying new exercises and introducing new topics to their existing classes, making small curriculum changes as they go. And most importantly for the success of CCE, Khalid is counting on teachers to spread what they've learned to other teachers. They'll have help, too, in the form of a planned alumni group with semi-regular meetings to talk about what everyone is doing in their schools.
Through a snowball process like that, Khalid is taking a very measured approach to reform, making small steps that he envisions spreading well beyond mere "civic education" after a few years of work. He vents at the requirement for Egyptians filling out almost any application form to list their religion. It is irrelevant and discriminatory, he argues. It's something he'd like to see changed, so that people can someday be hired independent of their religious views. But tackling that is hardly on his to-do list.
"I'm not going to do this. It's not my problem. It's the problem of the people which I'm going to train," he says. "All I'm going to do is sow the seeds in their brains. And they have to care about their plants and their seedlings."