Abstract
The Struggle for Citizenship Education in Egypt offers a timely contribution to the literature on education in Egypt and the Global South more widely. Taking Citizenship Education (CE) as its main focus, the book comprises a collection of 15 theoretically and empirically informed chapters that analyze the “narratives, spaces, and forms of citizenship education prior to the January 25th Egyptian Revolution and during its aftermath” (p. 1). In doing so, the book explores how Egyptian youth and educators are “transforming various educational spaces and subverting authoritarian education and rule, connecting education with social and political change” (p. 18).
The chapters are wide-ranging covering the rise of activism in Egypt (Chapter 2), social media and civic engagement (Chapter 3), how new forms of citizenship are influenced by Muslim youth volunteering (Chapter 4), how schools’ physical space and everyday disciplinarian discourses reproduce state hegemony as well as contradict it (Chapter 5), the discourses that shape the (under)representation of the Nubian community in school textbooks (Chapter 6), the understandings and enactments of notions of citizenship among students in Cairene schools (Chapter 7), the interpretation and adaptation of global citizenship education within a local international school (Chapter 8), how global citizenship education is taught in an elite Egyptian university (Chapter 9), the dynamics of nonformal spaces of citizenship education within public and private universities (Chapters 10 and 11), the emergence of an “unschooling” movement among middle and upper-middle class Egyptians (Chapter 12), child laborers’ and their families’ understandings of education and citizenship (Chapter 13), coworking spaces and promoting civic engagement (Chapter 14), and nonformal educational initiatives that offer competing understandings of Egyptian history and their links to developing critical consciousness (Chapter 15).
The main arguments developed in this collection coalesce around the Uprisings’ influence on the perceptions of citizenship in Egypt; the importance of broadening understandings of citizenship education; and, crucially, the agency of Egyptians to resist “top-down, one-dimensional nationalistic narratives” (p. 3) and to define their own understandings of citizenship. The book's uniqueness lies in its examination of CE from a range of perspectives including formal (schools/universities), nonformal (civil society organizations), and informal (family, peers, media) educational spaces. This is made possible by the diversity of the book's contributors and represents a valiant attempt to unravel CE “from more Western models that might not address the nuances of citizenship construction that shape post-revolutionary authoritarian contexts” (p. 3). This additionally helps highlight the importance of everyday “under the radar” spaces in enriching an active citizenship capable of challenging authoritarian regimes and societal inequalities.
Despite the laudable attempt to address CE from such diverse perspectives, this slightly hampered the book's overall coherence and consistency. On one hand, certain chapters advocated a critical CE (particularly Chapters 1, 5, 7, and 15) which coincides with the editors’ aims to challenge “hyper-nationalistic education … used as a tool to promote obedient and loyal subjects … as well as hegemonic global education that favors neoliberal citizenship” (p. 3). Whilst other chapters called for a CE that is apolitical (Chapter 8), or that is integrally linked to a culture of business and entrepreneurship (Chapter 14). Nonetheless, this could arguably indicate how contested understandings of citizenship can be, especially in the Global South.
A number of chapters considered questions of gender (Chapters 4, 5, and 13) and ethnicity (Chapter 6), but discussions surrounding class proved to be problematic, at times oscillating between thoughtful analysis and reflexivity (Chapters 4, 7, 12, and 15), and a relatively lack of self-reflexive awareness of the contributors’ and participants’ positionality. For example, Chapter 8 conducts an ethnographic study on a private international school in Egypt, but neglects to consider in any way, the impact that the founders’, parents’, and students’ class background has in shaping their understandings of “global citizenship education.” While Chapter 11, needed to pay more attention to the privileged class background associated with private university students and their extracurricular activities.
Through its impressive breadth of perspectives and methodological approaches, The Struggle for Citizenship Education in Egypt undoubtedly offers a crucial, unique, and significant contribution to our understanding of (citizenship) education in Egypt which carries implications to the rest of the region and the Global South. Transcending the mainstream literature's overwhelming focus on formal education represents a key contribution that, I hope, will encourage more researchers and educationalists to view education in a broader and more radical sense so as to envision alternatives to the existing system. It is for such researchers and educationalists that I highly recommend this book.