During the French mandate in Lebanon (ca. 1919-1946), the French Public Instruction Service, and later the Lebanese Ministry of Education, instituted various requirements for the opening of schools in the areas under French occupation. In its examination of the education and educational institutions in French mandate Lebanon, this paper puts these administrative requirements in conversation with the applications submitted by those girls’ schools requesting authorization to operate. Using official correspondence, announcements, and bulletins, application documents (these include letters of intent and support, academic programs and curricula, lists of textbooks, professional and educational credentials of the proposed teachers and directors, and school building floorplans), and press sources, this paper uses official, archival documents to show that educational institutions, operating within the confines of official and administrative requirements, negotiated the colonialist aims of the French mandate and the national aims of the nascent Lebanese government for their own purposes. Such an analysis, in making use of traditional political archival documents in ways that are “against the grain,” illuminates the ways in which both colonial and national power were subverted, challenged, or propped up within official, administrative confines by local institutions. More specifically, by examining documents from girls’ schools, this paper gets at the ways women and girls responded to both colonial and national expectations not only for curricular content, textbook usage, and the like, but also for women’s and girls’ role in the nascent Lebanese state. Ultimately, then, this study explores questions of the complex interplay among formal power, the various institutions that operate in colonial and national settings, anticolonialist and nationalist struggles, and gender.

With the 70th anniversary of what Benny Morris termed “the birth of the refugee problem” approaching, this paper analyses the origins and continuous effects of mass displacement as presented in Israeli and Palestinian textbooks since the 1993 Oslo Accords. This timeframe covers the incorporation of revisionist historiography developed in the 1980s and the early 1990s, but also demonstrates the transition in the educational narrative under the leadership of the Palestinian Authority. While previous studies concerning the presentation of the 1948 War in Israeli and Palestinian schoolbooks do exist, including those by Ruth Firer and Sami Adwan, a study solely dedicated to the changing presentation of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) remains absent. Applying collective memory theory to the educational realm, this paper demonstrates that education remains one of the primary realms through which a state can transmit “approved knowledge” to the younger generation (Michael Apple, 1986). The paper’s analysis of this purported official version of history is based on two research methods: primary source analysis and ethnographic data collection through elite interviewing. The primary research method consists of a textual analysis of 16 history textbooks used in the Israeli-Jewish state sector and 13 history textbooks in schools run by the Palestinian authority in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. In addition to examining the presented historical narrative in these books, this paper exhibits that that which is “hidden” or “missing” has been intentionally omitted in the attempt to shape the narrative of schoolbooks in line with the authors’ and/or society’s views. Previously conducted interviews with former Israeli and Palestinians ministers of education and government officials, executed as part of an ongoing DPhil, reveal the motives behind this hidden or missing information. This paper argues that while both Palestinian and Israeli textbooks fail in their attempts to educate students on the complicated reality of the 1948 War and its continued pertinence, this failure has occurred for different reasons. In Israeli textbooks, minimization of the continued suffering experienced by Palestinians reflects the hawkish political reality of the last twenty years. Conversely, Palestinian textbooks’ tepid narrative on al-Nakba, which solely offers limited insight into its role in Palestinian history and consciousness, illustrates the international constraints accompanying financial support and the ever-present accusation of incitement. These identified shortcomings lay the foundation for future reexaminations of the Israeli and Palestinian educational systems and their role in the perpetuation of the conflict.

Attainment of good education has been a corner stone in the daily narratives of the Palestinians mainly after Nakba of 1948. Education was seen as one of the few assets remained for Palestinians after their land was taken by Isreal. Yet, the level of education in the Palestinian Territories remains, to say the least, below the expectation of the Palestinian people and their educators. What has happened to the Palestinian education sector (school and university levels)? Why, despite the huge emphasis on education, Palestinian education has not lived up to the expectations of its people? What happened to the education process under colonization? This conference paper tries to answer these questions by looking into the settler colonial structure, its “laws”, and daily practices in Palestine. The aim of this research is to uncover the daily securitization of Palestinian education. That is, the process and manifestation of turning education into a mere security matter. It also fills a gap of the research about education under occupation mainly by analyzing the Israeli military orders related to education. In a quick glance into these orders one realizes that they were the only major framework governing “life” in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip especially before the Oslo peace process. The paper applies theoretical works of Giorgio Agamben on the “state of exception” (2005) and on the concept of Homo Sacer (1998), in addition to the work of Fanon (1991) among other post colonial studies (Pappe, 2003, 2007; Khalidi, 2004, 2006; Sultana, 2006 etc). The Research focuses on three major themes when it comes to education and how Israel jeopardized them: Place (almakan), human capital, and strategizing. It illustrates that even after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and the taking of “education” into Palestinian hands for the first time, education still constitutes a field of struggle against occupation (see work of Hooks 1994; Freire 2000). This is a co-authored paper. In-depth interviews will be conducted with some educators, professors, officials, etc. When studying the Israeli military orders discourse analysis will be applied. In addition, we will review secondary literature about education and collect primary resources from libraries of local schools and universities. Needles to say a major source of analysis for will be from the writers’ experience as university professors. P.S, in the selection about area at your website there is no choice of West bank and Gaza Strip as one area.

Before the introduction of government education in Egypt during the rule of Muhammad Ali (r. 1805-48), the term ilm signaled religious knowledge or knowledge from which one could derive spiritual benefit. As European knowledge was indigenized and circulated through the translation movement initiated at the School of Languages (1831-51), the definition of ilm began to shift. Intellectuals educated in some combination of the government schools, through student missions to Europe, and at al-Azhar began to advocate for a broadening of ilm to include a variety of new subjects, redefining the term to mean beneficial, rather than strictly religious knowledge. These reformers emphasized continuities and compatibilities between foreign technical expertise and local frameworks, hybridizing knowledge and imagining a further convergence of the already interdependent kuttab/madrasa and government systems. This campaign appeared in the pages of Egypt’s first educational journal Rawdat al-Madaris al-Misriyya (1870-77), marking a unique moment in the history of modern Egyptian education before the British occupation in 1882. This paper will examine this discourse on knowledge and education in Rawdat al-Madaris, with a particular emphasis on historicizing the interdependence of the pre-existing religious educational system with its government counterpart from the latter’s inception. Azhari students were the first to graduate from the School of Medicine and made up the corresponding medical student mission to France (1832-38), becoming the first Egyptians to teach and direct medical education in their country. The Azhari Shaykh Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi (1801-1873) who was trained in translation on the first student mission to Paris (1826-36) returned to Egypt to spearhead the translation movement as director of the School of Languages. As an educational reformer, al-Tahtawi championed the compatibility of European and Arab-Islamic epistemologies. The culmination of this interdependence of religious and government education came with the realization of the teacher’s training college Dar al-Ulum, which employed shaykhs and recruited Azhari students to be trained to teach in the expanded primary and secondary schools. Using published educational records and documents housed at the National Archives of Egypt, as well as the published writings of reformers and intellectuals both within and outside the pages of Rawdat al-Madaris, this paper challenges the assumed bifurcation between the religious and government systems of education in this period. A closer look reveals how interconnected these institutions and the individuals participating in them remained up until the end of Ismail’s rule, both epistemologically and materially.

What motivates authoritarian regimes to provide social services? Scholarship examining the logic of distributive politics in non-democratic contexts often conceptualizes these services as a form of rent allocation to a narrow group of elite cronies. Only very recently has scholarly work looked at how state-society relations in autocracies – and transformations therein – facilitate the development of social welfare policies. This article investigates the provision of education in Iraq under Ba’ath Party rule (1968-2003) to elucidate the logic of social services in an authoritarian context. First, it theorizes that the Ba’athist regime understood education as a means of both economic modernization and coercive political control. Throughout decades of Ba’ath Party rule, rapid expansion of the education sector and strict rules regarding school attendance were coupled with the banning of private education and the restriction of teaching opportunities to party members. Accounts of schooling during this time stress the permutation of Ba’athist ideology into every aspect of curriculum. Cumulatively, these reforms led to a school system aimed at shaping both the economic prospects and political orientation of the average Iraqi. In keeping with these observations, the paper hypothesizes that the regime maintained a particular interest in the education of sub-national enclaves of vocal, sometimes violent opposition to its rule. Next, the article presents a series of statistical tests in support of these claims. This analysis centers on an armed rebellion against the regime in 1991, occurring in some Kurdish and Shia areas, that almost resulted in its expulsion from power. It relies on a previously untapped spatial dataset of all educational institutions that existed in Iraq as of 2003, the year the Ba’athist regime was overthrown, in addition to district-level demographic and social surveys conducted in 2003-2004 by the Iraqi government. It shows that while other variables remained relatively constant, districts that participated in the 1991 uprising saw lower student-teacher ratios than areas that remained loyal. This finding is robust to additional tests, and starkly contrasts with the notion that authoritarian regimes punish restive areas by denying them high-quality public services. This paper contributes to work on regime survival and distributive politics in authoritarian contexts. Using subnational analysis, it contributes evidence that autocratic regimes understand welfare provision to be more than a means of reward and punishment, but rather a unique way to simultaneously ground their power in socioeconomic progress and ideological influence.