School textbooks and Assembling Egypt past - MES (original) (raw)

The 1923 Egyptian Constitution- Vision and Ambivalence in the Future of Education in Egypt

History of Education, 2019

The 1923 Constitution prepared the legal framework for Egypt's semi-independence from British imperial control under a newly established liberal monarchy. This Constitution carried a promise for a significant change in setting the ground for a nascent national system of mass elementary-education for boys and girls that would also be free of charge and compulsory. As I discuss in this article, this vision hardly matched Egyptian socioeconomic and cultural realities of the time. I explore this gap through a study of the deliberations of the Constitutional Commission that first drafted and later debated the various articles of the Constitution. I argue that the Constitutional Commission followed a consensus, both in Egypt and abroad, over the necessity of establishing a national system of mass education as a means for a broader social reform. Setting high expectations, this consensus would simultaneously enhance national education and the future setbacks that would beset its implementation.

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.

Seeking the Educational Cure: Egypt and European Education, 1805-1920s

European Education, 2012

This paper examines the development of European-style education in Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Egyptian reformers and governments, in their desire to create relevant and effective educational institutions, began looking to Europe for inspiration. The resulting institutions utilized modern methods while preserving the local character of education, often straddling the line between the strictly European and Egyptian. With these compromises and negotiations, ultimately, one of the most influential legacies of European education was the belief in education as a "cure" for all the ills of modern Egyptian society.

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

Modernizing Education in Egypt: How Britain Used Education to Rule Egypt

People of the Orient are incapable of rational thought and therefore have little to contribute to the world’s knowledge. This is a basic premise for justifying colonizing the orient as Edward Said exposed in his book Orientalism . As a result, orientalists conclude, the West must rule and govern the Orient for its own good. In reality, the West colonized primarily for its own benefit, primarily natural resource extraction and access to trade. Colonized nations like Egypt and India have deep cultural and epistemological traditions that, in many cases, well surpassed that of the colonizers. So how did the colonizers rule and dominate such culturally rich nations and, in many cases, even persuade the colonized of the inferiority of their cultural and epistemological traditions? How did the British manage to rule Egypt and convince Egyptians of the superiority of British and Western tradition and culture when Egyptians were practicing astronomy, architecture, medicine, and building a civilization at the time when the British were still nomadic hunters and gatherers? Education has been an effective mechanism for altering a peoples' culture and core beliefs thereby making colonial rule possible. In this paper, I explore how the British manipulated and used Egypt's education system to change Egyptians’ culture and epistemology resulting in a weakened society that enabled colonial and post-colonial rule. I argue that Egypt's education system has been at the core of a vicious spiral that allowed Britain to divide and subjugate Egyptians during colonialism and post-colonialism. Understanding this spiral and the results it yielded enables us to understand what the Egyptians have lost in culture and epistemology and how Egypt's education would need to change to restore that which was lost.

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.

The Late Mubarak Era, Education and the Research [open access]

Schooling the Nation: Education and Everyday Politics in Egypt, 2023

The condition of education in Egypt is driven by the management of the socioeconomic sphere by successive regimes and their ideological and strategic directions. In the late Mubarak era, the three features of crony neoliberalization, a weak informalized state and a deficit of legitimacy shape the practices of everyday governance and legitimation examined in the schools. This chapter sketches the political and economic context of the late Mubarak era and the ideological transition from Arab socialism to neoliberal Islamism. It provides essential background on tracking, quality and equity in the education sector, especially as crystalized in secondary schooling, and outlines the historical evolution of nationalist and ideological narratives as reflected in textbooks and schools and the securitization and Islamization of education. Finally, it describes the key attributes of the research sites and respondents in the two phases of research before and after the uprising, the key methodological issues involved in conducting the research in schools, the selection and analysis of textbooks and the most significant limitations of the research. Open access download: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108956031.002