In Jordan, students describe the Tawjihi as “the most important stage” in their lives, circumscribing their academic and professional futures. An exam which takes place at the end of high school, scores on the Tawjihi determine not only whether a student can attend college but what they can study. Parents have gone so far as to bring their children answers during the test, stopped only by the Jordanian gendarmerie. When results of the Tawjihi are posted, the country erupts with fireworks, gunshots, celebrations and parliamentary debates over cheating and the exam’s difficulty. This year the King tweeted that his “sons and daughters, who passed the Tawjihi exam, fill me with happiness…your help will make our way towards the future, and with your ambition our country will prosper.” This paper recovers the origins and politics of Jordan’s Tawjihi, and how standardized examinations more broadly shape the relationship between state and citizen. It argues that the promise of objectivity allowed the exam to take hold, despite many of its proponents goals of social engineering and even repression. This paper also analyzes why the Tawjihi exists in its current peculiar form and why it has taken on such overwhelming significance for the thousands of teenagers who take the exam every year. It draws on educational reports, oral histories, newspapers and other publications, from Jordan as well as Palestine and Israel. The Tawjihi began in Mandate Palestine, as the elite Palestine Matriculation Exam, a site in which British, Palestinian Arab and Jewish as well as missionary figures fought over form, subject matter and purpose. The Transjordanian Matriculation, and in the mid 1940s the General Examination both nationalized testing, as it became firmly under the Transjordanian government’s control, but also internationalized standards as holders of the Transjordanian matriculation examination could attend the American University of Beirut at a sophomore level. The exam itself was a political site: it could be used as an unwieldy tool of regulating not only schooling but access to white-collar employment. It also functioned as a claims making device on the Jordanian government, due to its purported objectivity.

The early twentieth century in Egypt brought a florescence of discussion about what education was for and who should do it. While the British colonial government limited support for mass education, writers from across the political spectrum wrote books and articles arguing for the need to cultivate and educate the people towards a variety of ends. These ends ran the gamut from the maintenance of a hierarchical social order to the production of free and autonomous men equipped to govern themselves. All of these visions of what education should accomplish, however, had to contend with a powerful gendered model that had risen to prominence in the preceding decades: the idea that women, particularly mothers, were responsible for the essential work of moral cultivation in early childhood, whereas men—be they fathers, bureaucrats, or schoolteachers—should oversee the formal book-learning prescribed for the adolescent years. This paper draws on debates in the Egyptian periodical press as well as key texts in the history of pedagogical thought in Egypt to explore a rising tension between the role of the home and the mother in educating children, and the role of the school and the state. It focuses on the work of fiery anti-colonial thinker and government educational inspector ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Jawish to trace the rise of an argument that the state should take over the work of moral cultivation that had for decades been tied to the unique capacities of mothers in the home. Jawish’s 1903 text, Resources for Educators: New Methods in Tarbiya and Ta?lim (Ghunyat al-Mu?addibin: al-Turuq al-Haditha lil-Tarbiya wa al-Ta?lim), revealed a deep suspicion of the new powers being attributed to feminized domestic spaces and practices, which were ungovernable by the state’s male agents. With women out of the picture as educators for a Muslim future, Jawish’s vision of the educator state had to fill spaces that had been defined around women’s unique maternal capacities. The state, then, had to show that it too could mother: its schoolteachers could nurture children with love and affection, invoke joy and pleasure, and demonstrate a moral perfection worthy of emulation, all while teaching children the skills they needed to know. While Jawish was opposed by contemporaries like Rashid Rida, who counselled against state intervention in education in the name of “upbringing-towards-independence” (tarbiya istiql?liyya), Jawish’s vision of the state as educator and moral cultivator had lasting appeal through the interwar period and beyond.

In October 1929, the Ministry of Education established ma‘had al-tarbiya—a new department of pedagogy at Fuad I University in Egypt. The purpose of the department was to replace training facilities that had previously been set up to serve Egypt’s nascent public school system thereby effectively taking over the enterprise of teacher training in the country. The department’s curriculum included mandatory courses in psychology, theories of pedagogy, the history of education, experiential learning/education, library research methods, art and physical education. Most striking was the founding of so-called “experimental classrooms” which were attached to the department and in which teachers could test out “modern” teaching methods on the ground. In short, the department was a bastion of what historians of education call “progressive/modern” pedagogy in that it placed an emphasis on child-centered learning, relied on child-psychology, believed in freedom in the classroom and in the eradication of rote memorization. The purpose of this paper is to unpack the relationship between ma‘had al-tarbiya and progressive pedagogy from 1929-1952. Most historians have tied the story of education in Egypt—and the larger Middle East—to that of the nation-building project thereby omitting the richness of the pedagogical innovations espoused by ordinary teachers. In contrast, this paper seeks to look at educational ideas and practices in their own right by zooming in on one of the most important training institutions for teachers and examining the ways in which it sought to train them. The paper asks three inter-related questions: Why and in what ways did Egyptians develop progressive practices at ma ‘had al-tarbiya? Were such practices an exception or were they part of a local/regional trend? Finally, how do these practices relate to questions of modern subjectivity and transnationality? Drawing on a multitude of primary materials including teacher training manuals, pedagogy magazines, and student magazines produced by the department, this paper argues that ma‘had al-tarbiya was by no means unique in its espousal of progressive methods. In fact, it belonged to a long line of activists, teachers and bureaucrats who became champions of progressivism in Egypt. The sources suggest that the department was part of a growing network of transnational and international pedagogues whose belief in “modern/progressive” methods helped shape state-sponsored schooling world-wide. Finally, the paper highlights that Egyptian pedagogues were not docile recipients of an Anglo-American theory of progressive education in a diffusionist relationship, they were active co-creators of progressivism—through ma‘had al-tarbiya.

One of the abiding themes in Palestinian communities is education as success story: success of self, success of family, and success of nation. This paper seeks to unravel this trope, detail its origins, its logics and the consequences of that logic in Palestinian political and social life in the aftermath of the 1948 war. Reading policy papers and analysis produced by the PLO and its political parties, the UN and the various organisations laying claim to humanitarian support for Palestinians, including but not only UNRWA, from 1948 to 1993, and memoirs and oral histories of teachers, students, bureaucrats and policy makers from Palestinian communities across the Arab world, I explore how multiple figures at several social scales formed, framed, and materialised this trope to build the scaffolding for shared ideas of Palestinian self and state.  Education did not only marshall international resources for humanitarian purposes, but directly worked to reconfigure Palestinian social and political aims. It ranked choice and trajectory for labour export, prepared Palestinian young people for hierarchies of class mobility, and established new genderings of labour life. It built conditions for political voices and re-imagined lives - women as carers and providers, social relations built on remittance and alienation, extraction and rebellion. This is an essay that seeks to wrestle education from a nationalist and analytically reductionist narrative that renders education as a mere handmaiden to a de-textured and de-classed Palestinian historiography. It hopes to offer a way through which to understand precisely why and how education came to be the central crucible, in both surprising and not so surprising ways, of Palestinian social transformation in the aftermath of expulsion.