Linda Herrera (ed.), Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt (OpenBook Publishers, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Linda Herrera (LH): This was an unexpected book that came about due to unforeseen circumstances. Its origins can be traced to the summer of 2018 when I received a call from the then Minister of Education in Egypt, Dr Tarek Shawki (2017-2023). He had been a professor of engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign where I work in the College of Education. We met when he visited the campus in 2016 to talk about Egyptian education. Two years later, he was preparing for the rollout of a highly ambitious, historic, and potentially disruptive education reform by the name of “Education 2.0.” He invited me to come to Egypt to document and research the reform in real time, to serve as a kind of chronicler of this social, technological, and educational experiment. It was an intriguing proposition to say the least. My main condition was that I remain independent and not be expected to produce a state approved narrative of the reform, something I obviously would not have agreed to do. As a fellow academic himself, Shawki fully understood this concern, assured me of my research independence, and kept his word to the end.
After securing funding and arranging a secondment from my university, I went to Egypt to establish a research project by the name of the “Education 2.0 Research and Documentation Project.” It was housed at the American University in Cairo’s Social Reseach Center. I spent the first months hiring a small but stellar local team of researchers including two people who worked in video production. We were ready to hit the ground running, but faced roadblocks like security clerances, when it came to conducing the research. We had to constantly find workarounds. My initial idea was to build an extensive oral history archive of educational and technological change in Egypt from the “top down” and “bottom up” and to produce an open-access repository of materials related to the reform. Just a few months into the work, however, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the project’s ambitious plans quickly unravelled. I had to pivot from the grand ideas of building a vast oral history project to a more modest alternative which involved a website, YouTube channel, and finally, a book, this book. The plan from the beginning was to make it entirely open access which is why I worked with the wonderful press, Open Book Publishers.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
LH: Education is incredibly multifaceted and requires being cognizant of the global policy picture while remaining tethered to the local/national/regional context. The themes covered in the book span issues and literatures such as the digitalization of education, high-stakes testing, reading and cognition, distance and hybrid learning, educational entertainment, formal and informal teacher professional development, sustainable development, student cultures, social media as a site of public discourse, and the future of work during the “Fourth Industiral Revolution” (4IR). The book also connects to the context of Egypt in the aftermath of the uprisings of 2011-2013, with attention to the strained social contract between the state and its citizens. It situates the reform in the mega projects taking place in the country, and the government’s official development orientation in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 2030 and Africa Agenda 2063. The introduction situates Egypt’s educational experiment in these broader national, regional, and global frameworks. Each individual chapter explores a topic in more detail, combining the interlocuter’s personal experiences and narrative within a larger political, policy, socio-economic, and cultural context.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
LH: I have been active for a long time in conducting ethnographic and oral historical research and making connections between what is happening at the local level to macro (geo)political and economic change. However, my starting point was never from the “inside,” meaning from the inner circle of a minister, his advisors, and international partners. This was new, and a very different experience. I was conscious about how unique this access was from a research point of view and was quite certain it was not going to happen again, or at least not anytime soon. To be able to get to know and interview people as they were rethinking and reorganizing major aspects of Egypt’s education system, to have them give me hours of their time as they were constantly “putting out fires,” was humbling and came with responsibilities. To be clear, being close to “power” does mean that I lost my critical facilities, but that I came to realize how elusive and fragile power actually is. More importantly, I never thought of this as just “my” research, but worked on this book and larger documentation project in the spirit of performing a public scholarly service. I always tried to follow the principle of “do no harm,” something that is easier said than done. It took me five years of work after the funding had ceased, and three years after the minister was repaced by subsequent ministers, to finish this documentation project.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
LH: The education space is filled with a wide spectrum of people, from career technocrats to educators, critical scholars, tech entrepreneurs, you name it. I initially saw my core audience as people who are working inside the sector, especially on issues related to policy change and digitalization. But the chronicler or scribe in me recognizes the value of leaving a record for future generations of social historians, students, and scholars of education.
Regarding “impact,” it is hard to assess the impact of ideas, experiences, and stories. It might be better to think about this work in terms of possible influences it might have on ways of researching education. At a minimum, I am trying to pursue a different model of research and dissemination outside of the typical for-profit publishing models and the very flawed reward structure in academia. I am also interested in pairing oral history with critical policy analysis. An education reform may not be as dramatic as a revolution or major upheaval, but it is nevertheless an “event” that merits documenting, reflecting on, and probing as we struggle to understand, manage, and make decisions about the unstoppable change that is transforming all our lives and societies.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
LH: For now, I am working on getting this book translated into Arabic. I am also continuing efforts to make the resources I have collected available for public access in both Arabic and English. I have already done quite a bit of this work through building a dedicated YouTube channel with oral history highlight videos and excerpts of education policy related press conferences and interviews. There are a number of videos dealing with how the ministry introduced digital tools and platforms to K-12 education and dealt with school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, both of which I think have historical significance. I also built a website that has the full repertoire of the Education 2.0 textbooks and Teacher’s Guides from KG-Grade 6, along with other materials like curriculum frameworks, policy documents, reports, and images from the ministry and schools. These platforms are temporary solutions. I am still in the process of identifying a more permanent site or library that can house these resources. It is trickier than I expected.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 1: Introduction: Learning from Egypt’s Historic Education 2.0 Reforms, pages 1 to 38)
In September 2018, Egypt’s Ministry of Education and Technical Education (MOETE) began rolling out elements of a ‘new education system’ (al-nizam-al ta’alim al jadid) also known as ‘Education 2.0’. This bold attempt to reimagine and redesign the system of Kindergarten through to Grade 12 had not been attempted for well over half a century. The idea was to raise the quality of a long deteriorating and over-stressed education system while transforming the culture of learning in ways that would prepare the society for the unpredictable yet unstoppable changes occurring in the realms of work, communications, economy, and society associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). The reforms were implemented at scale, an audacious undertaking since Egypt’s education system spans a diverse social and economic landscape with over 25.6 million students, 1.4 million teachers, and 57,000 schools (in 2023). It is by far the largest education system in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and the second largest in Africa, after Nigeria. In material terms, public education is exceedingly under-resourced and suffers from acute classroom overcrowding, an ageing infrastructure, and chronic teacher shortages.This new system, with its skills-based curriculum, teacher professional development on new learning approaches, updated system of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) (Technical Education 2.0), and digital transformation…would supposedly take Egypt on a ‘journey to the future’….
This chronicle of Education 2.0 provides a rare glimpse into a state-led national education reform. The volume is informed by the questions: What big ideas and theories of change underpin the Education 2.0 reforms and where did they come from? Who were the figures driving the change, and what did they hope to achieve? What did students, teachers, and families understand about the reforms, and how did they interact with them? What does this national experiment reveal about state-society relations and the social contract around the purposes, expectations, and future of education?
…More than a conventional reform, Education 2.0 also set out to reengineer the sector’s political economy. …[It] constituted a mega state development project akin to building the Aswan Dam or the Suez Canal…. It involved laying fiber optic cables throughout the country to provide schools with WIFI connectivity and servers, establishing data centers for managing and storing the massive amount of digital content from its online platforms, building brick and mortar factories and technical schools to produce the hardware, software, and labor force needed to stimulate the education market, and creating a state-of-the-art media studio from the ground up to produce thousands of videos to support the ‘open school’ concept…Between 2018-2022, the MOETE achieved massive operational feats as it equipped high schools across the country with 9,246 laboratories, 36,210 smart boards, and 27,439 upgraded classrooms…. As of 2024, it distributed 3.3 million tablets to first-year high school students.
… The call to overhaul Egypt’s education system emerged at a critical juncture in the history of the MENA region and needs to be placed in a broader regional and global context. Starting in Tunisia in December 2010 and continuing through 2013, a groundswell of popular uprisings spread in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Palestine, and beyond. Multitudes of young people joined by scores of others, took to the streets and social media to express their grievances about the lack of employment opportunities, widespread corruption, poor quality education, the absence of basic rights and protections, and their inability to lead a life of ‘dignity’ (karama). The people demanded Ayesh, Huriyya, Idala Ijtimaiyya (‘Bread, Freedom, Social Justice’). The 25 January 2011 Revolution in Egypt resulted in the toppling of the thirty-year presidency of Mohamed Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011) and set into motion a series of upheavals over the succeeding years. From 2011-2014, Egypt witnessed three constitutional conventions, three election cycles, four heads of state, and from 2011-2017, seven ministers of education.
In 2014 as the dust began to settle, the Arab Republic of Egypt entered ‘a new era’. Under the presidency of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, former Field Marshal and Director of Military Intelligence, the post-revolution government proclaimed itself the legitimate bearers of the revolution though detractors point to this period as the start of the ‘counterrevolution’. As the state thwarted dissent movements and clamped down further on citizens’ rights, it also pursued ambitious mega projects to forge a ‘New Republic’ (al-jumhuriyya al-jadida). These mega projects spanned several sectors including transportation (through the construction of new roads and bridges and expanding the Suez Canal), urban development and real estate (by erecting new ‘smart cities’ including a new administrative capital), public health (with the launching of the 100 million health campaign to combat Hepatitis C, developing a universal health insurance system, and opening new hospitals), tourism (through building new museums and expanding touristic sites), rural development (through initiatives in the Egyptian countryside), and digital transformation (through national projects such as Digital Egypt). The state project of building a ‘new education system’, was arguably the most challenging of all.
… This volume is based on oral histories, participant observation, and analysis of primary source materials collected during the first five years of the Education 2.0 reforms. It interrogates how new ideas and practices concerning learning, pedagogy, knowledge production, and technology enter the public and political spheres and how local actors interpret, react to, and selectively adapt them, sometimes creating alternative ideas and practices along the way. It is divided into two sections. Part 1: Oral Histories of Education Policy Innovation and Change (Chapters 2 through 23) puts a spotlight on the leaders and architects of the new education system and the changing EdTech landscape. Part II: Teacher and Student Perspectives, elevates voices and experiences from within schools and local communities (Chapters 24–29).
As a methodology, oral historical inquiries revolve around an event or period in history. The Oral History Association (OHA) describes it as ‘a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events’ (OHA n.d.). For purposes of this study, the ‘past event’ refers to the first phase of the Education 2.0 reforms (2018-2023). The participants include figures involved in key decision making, experts who developed curricular frameworks and materials, engineers who built and ran the digital systems, and students, teachers, and parents who were at the receiving end of the reforms. While participants recount stories from the ‘past’, it is the recent past going back sometimes to 2014, and at other times to an event from months, weeks or days earlier. Another common feature of oral history is that it usually draws out peoples’ stories and memories to construct a social history from the ‘bottom up’ … In the context of this research, we view the ‘bottom up’ as reflected in the voices of students, teachers, parents, and other members of school communities…. However, oral history can also serve to build an historical record from the ‘top down’ by including people working at the ‘macro’ levels of government and international and multilateral organizations. Somewhere in the middle at the ‘meso’ level, are figures such as ministry officials and supervisors working in educational districts, and local experts involved in the reform efforts. These multi-level perspectives provide a level of depth and critical understanding missing in formal documents like sector strategies, policy reports, and impact assessments.
…Whatever lessons we learn and critiques we raise, education research reminds us that we cannot afford to turn to cynicism, throw up our hands in exasperation and lose hope and direction. The overwhelming fact remains that scores of people go to great lengths and make enormous sacrifices to be educated. Communities fall into the deepest of despair when their education systems and infrastructures are weak, or even worse, when they fall victim to deliberate attacks and destruction. Some of the most egregious examples of schools, teachers, and students being intentionally targeted in ways that deny them education and life can be found in occupied Palestine, which is undergoing unspeakable anguish at the time of writing. In a rapidly changing, oftentimes harsh and unpredictable world, we must continue to learn from the past, evaluate the present systems, and strive for a social contract in education oriented towards human dignity, universal principles of respect for all forms of life, and genuinely sustainable futures, for our collective survival depends on it.