Education and British Colonial Policy, 1882–1922

The metaphoric spirit of the age, as evoked by the inventions of science, intercourse with European countries, and other invigorating influences have already done something to inspire the [peasant] with the rudiments of self-respect, and a dim conception of hitherto unimagined possibilities.

Fourteen years after Sachot's visit, and bound by the same notion of the civilizing mission, the British administration of Egypt set out to reshape and systematize existing educational institutions, using as models both its Indian experience and the lessons of rural popular education at home.^[28] British attitudes toward education were conditioned by their belief that Egyptian society could be bettered (and the country's debt to European creditors liquidated) only through a carefully managed set of reforms aimed at increasing the country's agricultural productivity. Consequently their greatest fear was of a misdirection of effort toward a rapid industrial development that might divert resources from agriculture, threatening both the interests of the powerful local landowning class, and the supply of cotton to British textile mills.^[29] Concern for the potential loss of the rural labor force was articulated as early as 1840 by Bowring, and in 1905 Lord Cromer, the British consul general, warned that “any education, technical or general, which tended to leave the fields untilled, or to lessen the fitness or disposition of the people for agricultural employment, would be a national evil.” ^[30]

Philosophically, the relationship between colonial economic and educational policy was based on Britain's Indian experience, which the historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay had articulated in his famous speech to the House of Commons in July of 1833, outlining for his colleagues “the most selfish view of the case”:

It is scarcely possible to calculate the benefits which we might derive from the diffusion of European civilisation among the vast population of the East. It would be…far better for us that the people of India were well governed and independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us; that they were ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were performing their salams to English Collectors and English magistrates, but were too ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages. That would, indeed, be a doting wisdom, which, in order that India might remain a dependency, would make it a useless and costly dependency, which would keep a hundred millions of men from being our customers in order that they might continue to be our slaves.^[31]

In Egypt, educational effort was therefore to be split along class and geographical axes, reinforcing the barriers between country and city and maintaining an appropriate class hierarchy. The course of instruction in elementary schools or kuttabs—usually the only schools available outside the provincial capitals—did not allow successful students to continue on to European-language education in preparatory and technical schools, or to obtain the certificates that would allow them employment in the civil service. Instead the village schools were, from 1898, allowed to compete for financial support by a competitive system of grants-in-aid from the Ministry of Public Instruction, which entailed bringing themselves under that ministry's inspection. One of the criteria for eligibility was that all instruction be in Arabic. But since instruction in higher schools was at least partially in French or English until 1908,^[32] this meant an automatic bar to social mobility for the poorest section of the population, who could not afford school fees in the higher primary schools. After this date, a ceiling placed on the potential salary of individuals without secondary certificates meant that, unless a family possessed sufficient resources to see their child through both paid primary and secondary education, even beginning the process would be pointless.

The British-controlled government articulated specific educational goals having to do with the staffing of the local civil service, the spread of basic literacy in the countryside, and later, the creation of a thrifty peasantry and an artisan class skilled in European manufactures.^[33] They and their domestic allies pursued these objectives with different degrees of official energy and different degrees of success. But alongside these restricted official aims were the goals of affirming colonial authority and creating a new social order in Egypt. These latter ambitions, broad practical components of the colonial enterprise articulated as long-term cultural goals rather than as school policy, were: (1) the creation of a new moral consciousness in the population; (2) the maintenance of public order; (3) the Europeanization of the class structure; and (4) The Europeanization of the family, glossed as the liberation of Egyptian women. Examining each of these goals in turn, we can see how intellectual and political trends in Europe influenced the development of educational theory and practice in Egypt.