Jonathan Vincent’s Reviews > Schooling the Nation: Education and Everyday Politics in Egypt > Status Update

More exam questions:

Love of the homeland is part of religious faith and should be translated into words and deeds. Write expressing your noble feelings and describing what youth should do to serve their homeland.

Final exam essay questions in Egypt:

Egypt, God's quiver on Earth, has unified its people and sacrificed its youth and money to fight off the barbaric attacks of the Tartars and the Europeans, and still has prominence in defending it's nation and unifying it. Write about the role Egypt takes in the defense of the Arab nation and achieving it's unity.

The few pages devoted to Coptic Christian History in history textbooks ends with an assignment to pupils to "write ten lines to the Danish cartoonist who insulted the Prophet."

So something I've been thinking a lot about recently is that the progressive West seems to be generally "winning" culturally worldwide, and this book has another example of it: lower class schoolgirls in Egypt take deliberately sexual pictures in tight fitting clothes to show friends to seem more "upper class" which really I think means more Western. The author says this is overriding conservative Islamic ideals

He describes a new way of student violence... such as smuggling soft weapons like blades and knives into schools.

Soft?? 🤨🤨🤨🤨

Not a quote, but an interesting observation: feminist groups in Egypt have a hard time motivating poor female students to focus on education because un- and underemployment are high, wages are low, and sexual harassment is ubiquitous. Marriage is simply a better option, and education isn't required for that.

Rebellion in schools revolves around displays of traditional gender roles. Boys focus on the "real world" of employment and responsibility while girls accentuate their feminity by exaggerating maturity and focusing on romance, marriage, and child-rearing.

Both of these serve to trap poor class students in poverty by pushing them into low-wage jobs and early marriages.

These conditions have led to increased inequality and diminishing returns to education. Education has been substantially devalued in the face of a rapidly increasing supply of educated individuals and limited expansion in the demand for educated labor.

"Under British colonialism, Egyptian schools were critical arenas for the struggle of independence, and in the postcolonial era were considered powerful vehicles for socializing the youth into state socialism and Arab nationalism."

This helped solidify something for me that I've been thinking about with Russia. In the USSR, schools were necessary to impart the ideology of the state...