"A collapse of formal schooling in Egypt": Interview with Hania Sobhy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Schooling the Nation: Education and Everyday Politics in Egypt (open access book)
Cambridge University Press, 2023
Telling the story of the Egyptian uprising through the lens of education, Hania Sobhy explores the everyday realities of citizens in the years before and after the so-called 'Arab Spring'. With vivid narratives from students and staff from Egyptian schools, Sobhy offers novel insights on the years that led to and followed the unrest of 2011. Developing the notion of 'permissive-repressive neoliberalism', she reveals the constellations of violence, noncompliance and marketization that pervaded schools, and shows how young people negotiated the state and national belonging. By approaching schools as key disciplinary and nation-building institutions, this book outlines the various ways in which citizenship was produced, lived, and imagined during those critical years. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Mafish Ta‘lim: Why Egypt Ranked Last on Education
Schools show us something fundamental about the functioning of state institutions catering to the majority of the population as they developed throughout the Mubarak era. They show us state institutions becoming thoroughly privatized and characterized by both growing disengagement and heightened repression. Despite billions in public and private expenditure, the quality of schooling has declined to the extent that Egyptians routinely remark that there is simply ‘no education’ in the country: mafish ta’lim. For the majority of more disadvantaged students, the public school, if frequented, is a place where one learns nothing, is routinely humiliated, cheats on the exam and is forced to actually pay for this ‘service.’
Losing the Future? Constructing Educational Need in Egypt, 1820s to 1920s
History of Education, 2017
This article examines petitions submitted to the Egyptian state by students and parents over the span of a century. These sources reveal that Egyptians from across the economic spectrum were shifting their construction of schooling in response to changing political and educational policies and evolving conceptions of educational need. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, parents and students were increasingly appealing to discourses about education, girl’s schooling, and nationalism as a way to frame their personal pursuits as an extension of national advancement. As a result, petitioner saw education not as a matter of charity or luxury, but rather as a fundamental way to prevent ‘losing’ a brighter future. Ultimately, this shift in the concept of educational need underwrote the development of mass educational systems of the twentieth century as a cornerstone of the relationship between even the poorest of citizens and the Egyptian state.
What Changed in Education Since the Egyptian Revolution [Open Access]
Schooling the Nation Education and Everyday Politics in Egypt, 2023
The 2011 uprising is a watershed event in contemporary Egyptian history in terms of the unprecedented scale of mass protest and the historic changes that followed it. This chapter asks what changed in relation to the production of lived and imagined citizenship in schools in the tumultuous months and years following the uprising. It outlines changes in the wider political, economic and social context and maps key changes in the educational sphere, presenting novel analysis on trends in teacher salaries and public spending on education. In analyzing the research with students, teachers and stakeholders from 2016 to 2018, it updates the discussion on the themes that are methodologically and conceptually developed across Chapters 1–6 in terms of informal privatization, permissiveness and violent punishment, and maps key changes to textbooks, rituals and student narratives relating to citizenship and belonging. In particular, it highlights trends of student contestation of violent and humiliating treatment and debates around the introduction of new pro-army song in school rituals and divergent textbook treatments of the Revolution and the legitimizing narratives of the regime. Open access download: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108956031.008
Reform, Resist, Recreate: The Role of Civil Society in Education in Egypt
This article aims to map the different kinds of contributions to education by civil society, where civil society is considered not separate from the state and society but a product and a part of the interactions between these entities and within them.The main actors of Egyptian civil society in education are NGOs thanks to their sheer number; however, they also include unions of teachers and students, movements created by parents, researchers, and individuals. The study aims to analyze the conditions and environments which “inspire and give birth to these organizations”; will assess the contributions of civil society within the socio-political context of post-2011 Egypt, and will take stock of the laws organizing their work.
Schooling the Nation Education and Everyday Politics in Egypt, 2023
The pervasive informal privatization of public institutions seen in urban secondary schooling is a key component of the lived citizenship of different social strata. Many of the arguments in the book depend on an appreciation of the implications of pervasive private tutoring for the everyday school and for articulations of citizenship and national belonging among students. Privatization-by-tutoring affects almost every aspect of school life in Egypt, from whether students and teachers come to school or enter classrooms to whether the morning assembly ritual is performed. It is, however, the different ways in which informal tutoring markets are established within and alongside formal institutions in the three types of school that reflect the functioning of state institutions and differentiated modes of lived and imagined citizenship. The chapter dissects the trajectories, functioning and implications of informal privatization in different tiers of schooling. It explains enrollment in tutoring, its costs, the related forms of coercion, cheating, truancy, narratives of conscientious teachers and tropes of neoliberal subjectivity. Open access download: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108956031.003
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020
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Egypt: Inequality of Opportunity in Education
Policy Research Working Papers, 2014
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