Egypt is scaling up the number of elementary schools incorporating Japanese education practices designed to cultivate self-reliance, cooperative learning and other social skills on a national level.
Mohamed Abdel Latif, Egypt’s minister of education and technical education, said the country will increase the number of publicly run Egypt-Japan Schools (EJS) to 500 from the current 69 in the next five years.
Adopted practices include “nicchoku” (students on class duty), “gakkyukai” (homeroom meetings) and “gakko gyoji” (school activities), which are common in Japan.
Additionally, elementary schools are required to offer one period of “tokubetsu katsudo” (extracurricular activities, “tokkatsu” for short) a week as part of their curriculum.
In an interview with The Asahi Shimbun, Latif spoke fondly of Japanese-style education, saying that it places importance on character building and that EJS students are self-dependent and can manage themselves.
The schools accept students ranging in age from kindergarteners to high schoolers.
The country also intends to introduce Japanese-style education methods to about 18,000 public elementary schools nationwide.
To help Egypt achieve its expansion goal, Hiroshima University has embarked on training teachers in the country through an agreement with the Egyptian Ministry of Education and Technical Education.
Established in April, the training program saw the university send a team of about 10 education experts in September.
Egypt plans to train 200 teachers in the first two years and 5,000 annually in the future.
TEACHER TRAINING CURRICULUM
When Mitsuo Ochi, president of Hiroshima University, visited Egypt and met with Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in April, the Egyptian president told him that he has deep respect for Japanese people and that he would like to learn the Japanese education and human development methods to incorporate them into his country.
In 2016, Shinzo Abe, then prime minister of Japan, and el-Sisi announced the Egypt-Japan Education Partnership. Under it, Japan has been offering education support to Egypt by utilizing Japanese characteristics.
In 2018, the Japan International Cooperation Agency decided to extend 18.6 billion yen ($118.3 million) in loans to Egypt for construction of schools and other costs.
The agency dispatched a total of 40 former teachers as volunteers to help school staff and other front-line education workers in the country.
Hiroshima University’s role is to accelerate this expansion and help the education style take hold.
Along with dispatching experts, the university has developed a year-long teacher curriculum for those graduating from college in Egypt. Cumulatively, classes are worth 30 course credits.
“I have never heard of a Japanese educational institution embarking on a full-scale initiative to train teachers outside the country, and it is an epoch-making effort,” said Takeshi Miyazawa who heads the Office for International Cooperation Planning at the education ministry.
Latif views the agreement with Hiroshima University as a way to help working and aspiring Egyptian teachers learn Japanese practices, acknowledging that it could be a big turning point for the education system in Egypt.
“We learn from the resilience of the Hiroshima people and how resilient they are, how strong they are. … what happened after the (atomic) bombing with the introduction of open-sky classrooms shows education came first before anything else,” Latif said. “That’s the resilience we want to try to emulate and learn from.”
(This article was compiled from stories written by senior staff writer Hideki Soejima, Yasukazu Akada and Eriko Kai.)