Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles

At first glance, Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles seems to deal more with ideological struggles than civic values. However, Linda Herrera's detailed analyses of the roles of religion and informal bureaucracy in education, in addition to a graceful weaving of everyday occurrences and developments at schools across Cairo, make Educating Egypt a gem of a book in the expanding literature on the sociology of education and civic values in Egypt and the MENA region. The book is divided into three core parts dealing with disparate yet occasionally overlapping aspects of education in Egypt: State schools (Part One), Islamization and privatization of education (Part Two), and globalization and geopolitics (Part Three). Herrera has resided for long periods of time in Egypt and is a well’established researcher with decades of experience investigating the changing perspectives of stakeholders in the Egyptian education system. Her familiarity with the Egyptian education system and policy-making—and their development over time—is reflected in the way the modern and contemporary history of Egyptian society are outlined in Educating Egypt.

It is noteworthy that Herrera starts her book by distinguishing between the different connotations of the word “education” in the Arabic language (namely, tarbiya“upbringing” and ta’lim“knowledge”). This allows readers to grasp underlying societal attitudes toward education in Egyptian and other Arabic-speaking societies and provides an insider's take on the key functions and features of education in Egyptian society. It also allows the author to masterfully impart their knowledge of changes in the historical undercurrent of education ideologies in Arabic-speaking societies.

The author describes her target audience as “people who work in the field of education . . . students, and lay readers” (p. xi). It is unclear whether lay readers would be able to understand the purpose of or methods involved in conducting ethnographic research, as these are not clearly explained at the outset. Nonetheless, the chapters written in an ethnographic style (Part One) are highly accessible and enjoyable to read.

If there is one flaw in the book, it is that the majority of the fieldwork Herrera draws on was conducted at girls’ schools in Cairo. While this provides colorful glimpses into the world of education in metropolitan Egypt, it does not begin to penetrate the ways in which education is conducted or contested in rural schools or secular private schools, the latter of which have been a mainstay of middle- and upper’class society for generations. While the work provides hints of the existing educational gap in the urban versus rural divide, no detailed analysis of the divide is offered. This could have been supplemented by incorporating findings from, for instance, Dancer and Rammohan (2007), who demonstrate how both gender and rural versus urban residence in Egypt affect educational attainment at the school level. In the second half of the book Herrera presents life histories of two Egyptian youths living in Alexandria, which somewhat compensates for the Cairo-centric focus of the book. However, the book itself could be renamed Educating Cairo without severely impeding the arguments and findings presented therein.

Given that the majority of her fieldwork was conducted at girls’ schools, it was wise of Herrera to focus on the gendered nature of educational curricula in Egyptian society. The discussion concerning this topic is wisely balanced in terms of drawing on teachers’ and students’ views, though more space could have been dedicated to sharing student perspectives. There is also a delicately balanced discussion of the phenomenon of “downveiling” at Egyptian schools, which broaches the pragmatism and practicality involved in decisions relating to religious dress among students and teachers. However, more attention could have been paid to the ways in which female students view the gendered nature of school curricula and underlying ideologies surrounding gender roles in society. This could have been done by tracing changes in attitudes toward curricula, in addition to conducting in’depth interviews concerning students’ perceptions of home economics and sewing class. The chapter detailing a home economics class stops short of offering students’ opinions but does describe in fascinating detail teachers’ and policy-formulators’ attitudes and opinions toward home economics.

The multifarious role of religion features heavily in Herrera's case studies of three private Islamic schools. These illuminating case studies offer a glimpse of how religious beliefs and customs are reflected in school administration practices. The case studies also demonstrate how socioeconomic class and status can play a significant role in shaping school policies, admissions, and attitudes toward learning and the wider role of education in the community. The blending of religion and social class is apparent in the various different private Islamic schools described in Educating Egypt and contain both inclusionary and exclusionary views of education. Tensions between religious ideology and state control are also neatly encapsulated in a case study of a school administered by members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

While it has become cliché to use the “microcosm of something” label in the social sciences to describe sites that represent wider social phenomena and realities, the chapters on state preparatory schools (Chapters 1 through 5) live up to the label in numerous ways. The way in which Herrera describes the political history of the arm bands worn by students, the ritualistic morning assemblies, and the status of teachers in society (and its subsequent degradation in neoliberal privatized systems of education) invites the reader to reflect on shifting values and allegiances in Egyptian civic society.

Herrera’s aim in Educating Egypt is to "bring issues and social realities to the surface” (p. 2). She achieves this by skillfully juxtaposing the demands and hardships of school teachers with the evolving education landscape in Egyptian society. Among the issues described in the book, the youth and their bleak outlook for the future dominate. Here Herrera's sharp critique of United Nation's Arab Human Development Report rhetoric in the aftermath of the Arab Spring is praiseworthy (Chapter 12), as she demonstrates how aloof policy’makers and regional experts were in terms of addressing and acknowledging the needs and political rights of youth in the MENA region (UN 2016). A minor though noticeable editorial lapse can be found in two separate case studies in which the author confusingly uses the same pseudonym (“Dina”) for two different female youth studying at university.

Similarly, Educating Egypt outlines the highly competitive nature of university entrance examinations and the resultant obsession with grades among students, families, and broader segments of society (e.g., the mass media). However, to avoid the reader interpreting this as a solely Egyptian or MENA phenomenon, Herrera could have alluded to similar obsessions with grades and high’stakes examinations found in neighboring and far’flung societies such as South Korea and Japan. Shadow education plays a major role in many societies, with families in South Korea (for instance) allocating approximately ten percent of their budgets to private tutoring and after’school lessons. The current transformations taking place in the Egyptian education system belie the widespread dependence on so’called shadow education across almost all socioeconomic strata of society.