Digital Paradoxes: Technological Promises and Educational Realities in Egypt

Hany Zayed, Marquette University

Between 2018 and 2022, Egypt implemented an audacious reform project involving the “digital transformation” of its public education system. Located within a state-led project to build a New Digital Egypt and forge a New Digital Citizen and accelerated with the coronavirus pandemic, this educational digitalization promised to transform Egyptian education and solve its entrenched problems. This paper presents an inquiry into the realities of digital technologies in education. Deploying a critical sociological lens, it asks what actually happens when digital technologies are infused into an educational system with a long historical lineage, a complex social milieu, amid a global pandemic, with the promise of transforming education. Using the case of Egypt and building on three years of digital ethnographic fieldwork, this paper shows how digital technologies produce paradoxes in education, contradictions between digital promises and educational realities, on the levels of educational institutions like public schooling and private tutoring, educational processes like learning and assessment, and educational practices like resistance and refusal. With those contradictions, the paper contends that while technology indeed transforms education, it transforms it in unintended and conflicting ways. By offering an empirically rich, theoretically grounded, methodologically innovative and practically significant intervention from the global South, this paper contributes to timely conversations on technology, education and society, and has critical implications for digital and educational futures beyond Egypt.

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 Presented in Session 34. Sustained Interventions in Schooling: Case Studies from Around the World