Copyright

Linda Herrera

Published On

2025-11-17

Page Range

pp. 41–64

Language

  • English

Print Length

24 pages

2. Becoming and Being the Minister of Education

Interview with Tarek Shawki

  • Linda Herrera (author)
Chapter of: Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt(pp. 41–64)
Tarek Shawki was unexpectedly called into government service to chair the Specialized Presidential Council for Education and Scientific Research while he was Dean of the School of Sciences and Engineering at the American University in Cairo. In 2017, the president appointed him Minister of Education and Technical Education to lead a comprehensive national education reform, ‘Education 2.0’. Shawki recalls his own quality public education in Egypt and Syria in the 1960s and 1970s, and his desire to bring that caliber back to twenty-first century Egypt. Inspired by Taha Hussein, a pioneering minister of education and man of letters from the past century, Shawki’s goal was to provide all Egyptians, regardless of their social class, gender, or location, a state-of-the-art quality public education. He recounts the challenges of working in a large state bureaucracy resistant to change, and his attempts to manage an often volatile public on social media. After leaving the position in 2023, he reflects on what he might have done differently and what he learned about Egyptian society.

Contributors

Linda Herrera

(author)
Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the Global Studies in Education program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Linda Herrera is Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the Global Studies in Education program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was director of the Education 2.0 Research and Documentation Project in Egypt and served as an international education advisor. A social anthropologist with expertise in the Middle East and North Africa, her research and teaching cover a range of areas including education and power, youth studies, citizenship education and critical democracy, technology and society, and international education development. Her books include, Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles (American University in Cairo Press, 2022), Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century (with A. Bayat, University of California Press, 2021), Revolution in the Age of Social Media (Verso, 2014), Wired Citizenship: Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East (Routledge, 2014), Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (with A. Bayat, Oxford University Press, 2010), and Cultures of Arab Schooling: Critical Ethnographies from Egypt (with C. A. Torres, State University of New York Press, 2006).