The physical space of the three schools of the Al-Basatin and Dar-elsalam iddarra privileged certain kinds of discourses connected with specific nationalist and religious meanings aimed at reproducing the loyal Muslim citizen. Despite the amount of jargon included in the educational reform’s vision, mission, and strategies for preparing future generations that can contribute to Egypt’s project of modernisation (MOE 2007), the three schools’ physical spaces attempted to support the state’s reproduction project and deterred the students from their goals (Lefebvre 1991). Moreover, the physical space and everyday life in the three schools explored in this chapter emerged to suggest that schools were resources of ambivalence and contradiction. Walls around the school buildings carried banners and other media propagating the educational reform discourses of the effective school that would ultimately contribute to achieving sustainable economic growth and democracy. However the schools’ physical arrangements, everyday disciplinarian discourses and forms of fragility (to be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5) had come to contradict the propagated reform discourses. Students were not interested in engaging in school activities and were not really trusting schools' improvement efforts. Female students in particular were subjected to schooling disciplinary hegemony which controlled their existence in their school’s public space and their participation in activities that would be seen as contradictory to modesty.
I maintain that the physical details and symbols in public spaces in schools only supported the state’s official authoritative discourse. School spaces were not a retranslation of all the invisible relations of power; however, they reflected the
challenges facing the schooling system and the political regime at large. Following Kaplan’s attempt to “trace how historically informed ideas, identities, and relations are converted into pedagogical practices” (Kaplan 2006:xvi), life in the three public secondary schools was a mere reflection of the fragile and ambivalent Egyptian political situation after 60 years since the 1952 coup and after 30 years of Mubarak’s regime. The schooling nationalist discourse manifested in a physical disciplining hegemony, different visual symbols and morning daily rituals was combined with an official Islamic view and challenged by a powerfully growing Islamist discourse. Realising the challenges facing the schooling system, the government was striving for reform. However, it was a reform that had the stamp of the same system of centralised authority (MOE 2007, Herrera 2006, Naguib 2006), trying to lead reform from above and ignoring local realities. Such reform efforts were reduced at the school level into written statements hung around the schools’ buildings and a useless rearrangement of desks claiming to promote “active learning” with no real improvement.
CHAPTER 4
Cracks in the “national security”: when schooling fails
4.1 Introduction
Chatting with a small group of 11th grade students in the Moustafa Kamel Boys’ School, Ahmed (a student) said: “our school is totally out of control.” He continued: “Look from the window and you will see students climbing the school fence getting into or escaping from the school in the middle of the day.” I looked from the window and there were approximately ten to fifteen students jumping over the school fence. Watching the scene of the students jumping over the school fence, I recalled both the early discussion with the Moustafa Kamel School’s management on the notion of “national security”, and the launching events of the five-year strategic plan of the Egyptian Ministry of Education in June 2007. The mission statement of the Egyptian state schooling system according to the five-year plan was:
to foster equal opportunities for all Egyptian students to realize quality education that empowers them to become creative life-long learners who are tolerant critical thinkers with strong values and a wide range of skills for active citizenship and dynamic participation in an ever-changing global society.
Despite the progressive schooling mission statement of 2007, I argue in this chapter that the Egyptian schooling system after thirty years under Mubarak’s rule is not qualified either to play its intended role towards maintaining “national security” for the Egyptian state, or to fulfil the state’s agenda of preparing young Egyptians for supporting the state’s measures for economic reform.
This chapter looks at the fragility (Fuller 1991) of the schooling system from four viewpoints. First: with a highly hierarchal and authoritative education system and at the same time less investment on the state’s side, schools and teachers are out of order and there is a widening gap between the schooling system itself and the teachers. Second: the students’ everyday tactics of chaotic behaviour and opposition
are creating cracks in the old collapsing body of the schooling system. Third: students’ absenteeism is the way through which they voice their disappointment with the schooling system and contribute to the commodification of education. Fourth: tutorial classes on the one hand were flourishing as an alternative to the collapsing system; however, on the other hand they manifested a highly commercialised education system through which teachers were selling their services and students had become customers in the education market.
In exploring the above-mentioned viewpoints, I continue in this chapter the school ethnography through which I became involved in the everyday life of the three schools. In the first section I will look at teachers and school staff negotiations in the school system to which they themselves are the key to its goals being achieved. In the second section I will explore the students’ reactions to the everyday school discipline. In the third section I will explore life in a private tutoring centre.