The experts said the Brotherhood started to Islamize curricula after the reign of Mubarak, and even chemistry textbooks contain Quranic verses.
Educational expert Abdel Hafiz Tael, director of the Egyptian Center for Right to Education, said the Muslim Brotherhood has received the file of Brotherhoodizing or ‘Islamizing’ the curricula since the former Mubarak’s regime, and this was accomplished through political deals.
He said examples of this are found in the addition of texts from the Quran in that high school chemistry textbook as well as ignoring the Coptic era, as if Egyptian history and civilization were created by Pharaohs and Muslims only.
The educational expert also stressed that Article 6 of the Education Act issued under the Mubarak regime stated that religious education, organization of Quranic memorization competitions and allocation of awards and prizes are collected from the taxes of Muslims and Christians. In reality, however, holding similar competitions for Christian students was prohibited.
Tael told MCN that when the Muslim Brotherhood assumed power, they completed what they started during the rule of Mubarak, and reached a stage where they “Brotherhoodized” curricula after having Islamized them in an earlier stage.
The Brotherhood replaced Egyptian national symbolic figures with Brotherhood’s figures, and their attempts reached to a point that they removed the National Party figures in their attempt to drain Egyptian history from history and national education textbooks.
“The Muslim Brotherhood took control of the three most important positions of the educational process by controlling those of directors of educational administrations, the head of the follow-up office and the head of the security office; these being the most influential positions on teachers. Such control process was as a prelude to transfer school administration to supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Tael added.
Tael said he made proposals to the 50-member constitutional committee amending the 2012 Constitution to take into account the importance of establishing clear education objectives through taking care of the interests of students, incitement to human dignity and staying away from discrimination in all its forms, whether between girls and boys or Muslims and Christians.
Tael suggested that when a Quranic text is added, a text from the Bible or from human heritage in general, should also be added. Alternatively religious texts should be limited to religion education textbooks only.
Labiba el-Naggar, an educational expert and a member of the National Front for Egyptian women, called for a general assembly of teachers to demand the impeachment of the Brotherhood’s head of Educational Professions Union, because of the positions of the union during the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood and its actions towards teachers who have been tried on charges of contempt of religions, and electing a new head for the union.
“The Egyptian education curricula of all stages have not established citizenship or respect for human and women’s rights for thirty years. This means that any school principal must be referred to investigation immediately and held accountable if he prevents saluting the flag or forces female students to wear hijab, as such practices prevailed in 2004 in some Brotherhood-controlled schools under approval of the former regime,” Naggar said.
Educational expert Ayman el-Biali, deputy head of the teachers’ Independent Union, said former Education Minister Ibrahim Ghoneim surrounded himself with the Brotherhood members to enable him to control decision-making. The aim of “Brotherhoodizing” the curricula was to ensure control over the ideas of successive generations to create a tributary carrying the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Biali said that “Brotherhoodizing” the ministry began with the printing presses, as the former minister changed the tender of books with an exaggerated condition of insurance fees, which the small presses could not pay. Therefore, the Brotherhood’s printing presses got the tenders and started printing the educational textbooks.
“The documents of Brotherhoodizing the curricula were prepared in advance in the Brotherhood’s Guidance Office, especially the religious education and history materials. That was part of the Brotherhood empowerment plan, to change some of the national concepts. They tried to replace belonging to the Egyptian national identity with belonging to the Islamic and the Muslim Brotherhood identity,” Biali added.
Biali said the history curriculum for the third year of high school prepared for the 2014-2015 school year included a whole chapter on the Brotherhood and its role in the nationalist movement, describing its leaders as national figures.
He added that the current minister, Dr. Mahmoud Abu el-Nasr, ordered the removal of these parts from the curriculum immediately. In addition, there is a committee formed by the ministry aimed to deepening the idea of belonging to the country and maintain the Egyptian personality with its authentic, Pharaonic features. There is also a process to remove the Brotherhood’s elements who were controlling the educational directorates, not because they are associated with the Brotherhood, but because they tried to derail the Egyptian education, keeping into account the efficiency standards.
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Edited from http://www.mcndirect.com/showsubject.aspx?id=49761#.Uk6y_hZzqlI