Educating Egypt

Civic Values and Ideological Struggles

Linda Herrera

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781649031037
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The everyday practices, policy ideas, and ideological and political battles that have shaped Egyptian education, from the era of nation-building in the twentieth century to the age of digital disruption in the twenty-first From the 1952 revolution onward, a main purpose of formal education in Egypt was to socialize children and youth into adopting certain attitudes and behaviors conducive to the regimes in power. Control by the state over education was never entirely hegemonic. National education came increasingly under pressure due to a combination of the growing privatization of the education sector, the growth of political Islam, and rapidly changing digital technologies. Educating Egypt traces the everyday practices, policy ideas, and ideological and political and economic contests over education from the era of nation-building in the twentieth century to the age of global change and digital disruption in the twenty-first. Its overarching theme is that schooling and education, broadly defined, have consistently mirrored larger debates about what constitutes the model citizen and the educated person. Drawing on three decades of ethnographic research inside Egyptian schools and among Egyptian youth, Linda Herrera asks what happens when education actors harbor fundamentally different ideas about the purpose, provision, and meaning of education. Her research shows that, far from serving as a unifying social force, education is in reality an ongoing battleground of interests, ideas, and visions of the good society.

Part One Schooling the Nation: Inside a Girls’ Preparatory School

1 An Ethnographer’s Orientation

Summary: It is extremely difficult to get the necessary security clearances to conduct qualitative research in Egyptian schools, but gaining access is just the beginning. This chapter describes how an ethnographer enters the world of a girls’ preparatory school (sixth to eighth grade) in Cairo in 1990–91, and recounts the early, awkward encounters with members of the school community. Over time, and with the help of the principal, a group of teachers, and the students, she slowly learns to navigate the environment. She comes to understand the school as a microcosm of the nation, where performances of citizenship, power, hierarchies, class, and gender dynamics, are on full display.

The First Day of School

On a bright fall morning two weeks into the 1990–91 term, I was nervous and full of anticipation for my first day of school. I would be spending a good part of the next nine months at an Egyptian government girls’ preparatory school, in order to produce an ethnography of its everyday life.¹ Wishing to dress for a part I had little idea how to play, I cobbled together a loose and long outfit that I thought might help me “blend in.” It consisted of a long-sleeved white button-down blouse, a striped cotton skirt that went down to my ankles, and tan loafers with no socks. I tied my unruly hair back in a ponytail and slung an oversized black leather briefcase over my shoulder. Looking back, this get-up made me look entirely conspicuous.

I arrived early to the security office of the American University in Cairo (AUC) in Tahrir Square. Mr. Amr was waiting in his neatly pressed powder blue uniform. He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a white envelope that contained my long-awaited research permit. As if setting my eyes on a holy relic, I asked if I could see it. He carefully unfolded the long single sheet of paper, adorned with an array of official stamps in indigo, black, and red. I stared in awe. For nearly two years, I had traipsed through countless security offices of the ministry of education, state security, and local district offices, on a quest for this permit. By some miracle, and surely with behind-the-scenes follow-up from AUC, the permit had now materialized.

2. Falaki School, Cairo. 1990. (Photograph by Linda Herrera).

To my enormous relief, Mr. Amr announced that he would accompany me to the nearby selected school to introduce me. We headed down Mohamed Mahmoud Street, crossed Yusuf al-Gindi dodging honking taxis and whizzing bikes, and stepped over the curb of Falaki Street, where we could hear girls chanting in unison from beyond the cement fortification. We walked a few paces down the tree-lined street and stopped in front of the main wooden gate. As Mr. Amr reached for the brass knocker, I muttered, “I hope they let us in.” He reassured me, “Don’t worry, we have the paper from the government (al-hukuma). They can’t say no.”

Someone on the other side cautiously unlatched the door just enough to allow us to squeeze through. Two girls sat on a small bench behind a rickety wooden table. They were wearing red caps and red arm bands with the words “al-hukm al-dhati” written on them in white Arabic script. Al-hukm al-dhati, which means “self-rule,” was instituted in the years following the July 23 Revolution of 1952, when the public school carried the revolutionary mission of cultivating citizen-students for the ambitious project of building a new, independent nation. It was meant to give young people a sense of duty to country, responsibility in running its institutions, and experience in self-rule. Al-hukm al-dhati performed a range of tasks from taking morning attendance and reporting absences to the social worker, to running errands for teachers and administrators. These largely consisted of bringing them chairs, delivering papers, and ordering tea (the school janitor maintained a kettle in a storage area, and provided tea and sugar on a metal tray for twenty-five piasters per glass). Their greatest responsibility was to secure the gate by keeping watch over who entered and exited the school.

The two girls asked for our IDs and jotted down our details in a mammoth rectangular ledger. They inquired as to the purpose of our visit, and then one of them stood to escort us to the principal’s office. We crossed the unpaved courtyard to the central building, an old villa with the original stone engravings of ribbons and bouquets of flowers across the upper windows, signs of bygone splendor. The school’s administrative offices were spaced across the ground floor, with the classrooms on the second floor.

In built environments, space is organized in a way that signals power, status, and the internal rules of hierarchy. In this ground-floor corridor of offices, a room to the left was flanked by two al-hukm al-dhati officers who stood at semiattention on either side of the door. This room was unmistakably the power center. The wooden plaque on the wall read “al-mudira,” The Principal. Our guide cleared her throat from behind the threshold, and announced, “Abla, these are the visitors from the American University.” Abla, a Turkish word to denote respect for an older sister, entered the Egyptian lexicon during the Ottoman period. Students referred to female teachers and other female staff as Abla as a sign of respect and closeness, as if the school represented a kind of national family.

With a curt wave of the hand, the principal gestured for us to enter. Abla Adalat was a handsome woman in her mid-fifties, with stern green eyes and a cream headscarf pinned tidily around her head. She sat behind a long sturdy wooden desk upon which sat a cup of tea, an ashtray (the principal smoked), and a manila envelope. She possessed an air of imperiousness mixed with impatience. Already at this early hour, she was holding court with several people vying for her attention.

Mr. Amr stated our business, explaining that I was a researcher from AUC and that the government had approved my request to conduct a study of Egyptian education by observing her school. She looked somewhat weary and replied, “I will need to see the permission letter,” which he duly handed over. Abla Adalat examined the paper, frowning. Once reassured of its authenticity, she placed it in her top drawer and said in a completely deadpan voice, “Welcome” (ahlan wa-sahlan). She gestured for us to take a seat on one of the wooden chairs lined in a row against the side wall.

Without missing a beat, she continued a heated conversation with a disheveled man who I later learned was Mr. Samir. He served in dual roles as school secretary and accountant. “Why isn’t there a chair in each classroom for the teacher?!” she demanded. Agitated, he insisted that it was not his fault and not his job to provide these things. Raising her voice, she retorted, “It is your job!” They continued in this vein, hurling accusations, recriminations, and threats at each other for a full seven minutes. I timed it. As Mr. Samir left the room grumbling, Abla Adalat sighed deeply.

As if aware she was playing a leading role in an unfolding drama, she turned to me and explained that she had only been at this particular school for two weeks: “I came here and found the school in complete disarray. It will take about two months for me to get things running properly, God willing. Little by little, order will come.”

Her manner with students often assumed the air of a strict disciplinarian. A girl from al-hukm al-dhati stood before her to dispatch a message, shifting her weight from side to side and flailing her arms in the air as she spoke. Abla Adalat turned to the social worker, Abla Azza—who had been sitting on the couch poring over some charts for over an hour—and lashed out at her. “Is that what you teach these girls? To stand anyway they want when they’re talking to an adult?! You have to teach them to stand straight with their arms at their side in a nice way. Things have got to change around here!” Just minutes later, another student approached, placed her elbow on the principal’s desk, and began speaking with eyes cast down. The principal shouted abruptly, “Stand up straight! Now keep your arms at your side.” The girl’s cheeks turned a shade of crimson and she mustered the courage to continue. She instinctively lifted her arms, gesturing emotively with her hands. The principal commanded, “Keep your hands at your side!” The girl left the room on the verge of tears. The next student received similar treatment. In quick succession, a fourth student entered the room and Abla Adalat could not bear it any longer. She took one look at the girl and, pointing her index finger towards the door, roared, “Get out!”

Over the next three hours a stream of visitors, ranging from parents, students, workers, and teachers to administrators, delivery people, and government inspectors, passed through the open office door. No sooner did the principal begin a sentence with one person, than another would lean over the desk and interrupt her to ask a question, state a problem, or request an official stamp or signature. “I will be with you next,” she would say, gesturing with her hand for the person to wait. The flow of human traffic picked up even further after the 11:30 a.m. recess, when a string of students entered to turn in items they had found in the courtyard. “This hair clip was on the ground, Abla.” “I found twenty-five piasters.” “Someone’s tie fell off.” Glancing down at the growing collection of lost-and-found items, Abla Adalat let out a long sign and shook her head.

Meanwhile, Mr. Amr edged out of his seat and stood up. He addressed the principal and asked politely if he should accompany me to the school the next day. “No, no,” Abla Adalat answered. “It’s not necessary. I know her now. She’ll be fine.” He excused himself and we said our goodbyes. Abla Adalat leaned over and asked in a muted voice, “What do you intend to do here at the school exactly?” I had thought a lot about how to answer this question and gotten some practice during various security office interviews. I explained in broken Arabic that I was interested in the history of education in Egypt, since the time of Gamal Abd al-Nasser, but that there was very little information about the actual day-to-day running of Egyptian schools. I wanted to document the everyday workings of a school as way of better understanding the education system. Since this school was specifically a girls’ preparatory school, it could also provide insights into the education of girls during the stage of adolescence.

Not entirely convinced, she asked, “Why was this school chosen for you?” I answered very straightforwardly that it was chosen because my contact at the Ministry of Education, to whom I was introduced through a contact at the American University in Cairo, knew the school’s former principal. In addition, I had requested a school near my home, since I had a two-year-old daughter whom I dropped off in a local nursery school while I was out, and this school was just a twenty-minute walk. She seemed reassured, and replied, “At your service.”

I took this opportunity to ask for some basic information about the school: the year it was established, famous graduates, the history of the villa, and so on. The principal admitted that as a newcomer herself, she did not yet know a great deal about the school’s history, and indeed would like to learn along with me. She called different people to her room—the librarian, the social worker, and a few senior teachers—and we were able to cobble together some information.

The original owner of the villa was a nineteenth-century astronomer, al-Falaki Bey, the name then given to both the school and the prominent downtown street on which it is located. At some point, probably in the early 1970s, an Egyptian oil company had bought the villa. Not long thereafter, the Egyptian government had entered into a permanent and irreversible rental contract with the company to turn the villa into a school. In this period, scores of villas throughout Cairo and throughout Egypt were being converted into schools to accommodate the growing student population, and to fulfil the country’s constitutional duty of providing universal schooling for all Egyptians. The villa, located on prime real estate just one block from Tahrir Square, was worth millions of Egyptian pounds. Despite the owner’s legal attempts to get out of the rental contract, the courts ruled in favor of the government. The rent on the property was set at a fixed sum of eighty Egyptian pounds per month, which in 1990 amounted to roughly twenty-four dollars.² There were at that time 1,066 students enrolled in the school, a villa originally built to house a single, grand family.

Having made some progress on the school’s history, it seemed like a good time to take my leave. In truth, I had been furtively jotting down snippets of observations and needed time to flesh out my notes, in order not to lose the vivid details. I stood up and thanked Abla Adalat and told her I would return the following morning. She said I would need to present her with a detailed research plan. I said, “Of course” (tab‘an), I had a document that I had already prepared and presented to the security offices. We said our goodbyes and I smiled at her with genuine gratitude for letting me take refuge in her office for these several hours.

Occupying a place on a chair in the principal’s room was the best newcomer’s orientation I could imagine. As visitors passed through the office on that first morning, some paused on seeing me. One visitor looked me over fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Educating Egypt: From Nation Building to Digital Disruption
• Part One: Schooling the Nation: Inside a Girls’ Preparatory School
• Part Two: Political Islam and Education
• Part Three: Youth in a Changing Global Order
• Part Four: Conclusions and Future Directions
• Notes
• References
• Index