The Malleability of Progressive Education: The early Nasser Years “…These are the accomplishments of our Madrasa Namuzajiyya (Model School) (…) May Allah lead us to a bright future under the guidance of the inspirational leader of Arab nationalism, our hero, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the pioneer of educational Nahda in the country.” This paragraph appears in the introduction of a booklet published by the Qaliyub Model School in 1959. Any historian of the Nasser period will be unsurprised by its content. After all, the glorification of Nasser, the use of flowery language and the insistence that better days were ahead were hallmarks of the post-1956 regime’s public discourse. However, the content is quite surprising considering the context within which these words were published. This is because model schools, or ‘experimental schools’ as they were first called when they emerged in the early 1930s, were initially established in order to test out the principles of progressive education in real life classrooms. In other words, they were associated with a movement which called for democracy in the classroom, critical thinking and respect for children’s desires and needs. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how progressive education came to be coopted by the Nasser regime. The vast majority of the literature regards nationalism as the driving force of Egyptian education. While nationalism certainly motivated many educational decisions, Egyptian teachers’ fascination with progressive education bore equal if not more weight, especially during the interwar period. With the advent of the Nasser regime, one might have expected progressive education to recede to the background and to make room for other more attuned pedagogical discourses. Instead, as late as 1959, Model Schools were established, and practical activities were promoted. In other words, progressive education was in full force. The paper therefore seeks to answer two interrelated questions: How and in what ways did progressive education come to occupy such a central position in the early Nasser years? What role did progressive educators play in this transition? Through the use of the pedagogy press, school magazines, and ministerial documents, the paper will argue that progressive education’s malleability allowed the Nasser regime to pick and choose features which were more in line with its pedagogical ethos while silencing many of the movement’s ‘undesirable’ tenets. It will also demonstrate that certain progressive pedagogues were able to reinvent themselves as regime supporters thereby creating continuities in educational policy.