School as the House of God

But as we have seen, parental responsibility for the moral education of children is not exclusive, and has in many particulars been assumed by the state. The parents' or community's contribution to socialization has long been recognized as incomplete, as affirmed by the colonial conception of the school as a place designed “to equip the pupil with sufficient knowledge to take care of his own interests in his own station of life.” And since “the school-centered authority of the nation- state” ^[47] in Egypt revolves around a nucleus of ideas including that of Islamic legitimacy, the school becomes the first, and in some ways the primary, public institution “in which the encounter with God is socially organized and prearranged.”

When I asked an elementary school teacher why schools teach Islam, when that should be the parent's responsibility, she immediately repeated the reasoning of earlier educational theorists who equated religious study with hygiene and civics:

It's a basic subject, like science or English or anything else. Of course it's the responsibility of the parents to teach the kids the most basic things about Islam, like how to pray, and this is right, and this is wrong, and to do this, and not to do that. But beyond that, the school teaches them about it, because not all parents, not all families, can do this, or know enough themselves about the religion.^[48]

Apart from the rather general aim of teaching children right from wrong, educational planners in Egypt have more specific political goals for religious study in primary schools, because “the Primary stage is the basic framework for the formation of the personality and ideas of young people [al-shabab], and we need more than anything else to strengthen this framework through true religious education which fortifies them against surges of extremism [al-tatarruf] and epidemic intellectual trends.” ^[49] As part of the continuing functionalization of the religious tradition, Islamic curricula from the primary level on up have been targeted, since the mid-1980s, at reducing young people's susceptibility to “political Islam,” another shorthand term for the oppositional aspect of the Islamic Trend.

It is here that matters become more complicated, for although there is, in theory, something like a unified curriculum (or at least a single set of approved textbooks), the country had, in the late 1980s, five different kinds of primary schools. Apart from the schools of the foreign communities (where a few Egyptian children attend along with the children of German, British, French, and American expatriates), all satisfy the curriculum requirements of the Ministry of Education, and lead to the conferral of the primary certificate after the fifth or sixth grade.^[50] Three types of schools are administered by government agencies: general primary schools are administered by the Ministry of Education, as are the relatively new “experimental language schools,” which teach some subjects in Arabic and others (usually math and science) in a foreign language, generally English or French. Al-Azhar maintains its own system of primary, preparatory, and secondary schools, which feed students into al-Azhar University.^[51] Experimental language schools enroll only a tiny number of Egyptian students: in 1986, fewer than twenty-four thousand at all educational levels from the primary through secondary grades. Significantly, the al-Azhar system has continued to expand more rapidly than the general primary system during President Husni Mubarak's tenure in office; the number of al-Azhar primary institutes increased by 85 percent, and the number of students by 125 percent, in the six years after Sadat's death.

Enrollment in primary education is extensive but not universal in Egypt. The Egyptian Fertility Survey, based on information collected between 1976 and 1979, indicated that 75 percent of Egyptian children (63 percent of girls and 88 percent of boys) of primary school age were actually enrolled in school. Between 1976 and 1986, the population between ages five and fourteen increased by almost a third, while the number of pupils enrolled in primary schools increased by nearly half due to an energetic program of school-building and promotion. Unfortunately, the rate of increase in the number of students has been nearly double the rate of increase in the number of schools and classrooms, leading to a steady increase in average class size and the institution of split shifts in schools around the country. The government has claimed, dubiously, that over 96 percent of eligible students are enrolled in primary school.^[52] Most studies show wide disparities in enrollment between boys and girls, between urban and rural areas, and between Upper and Lower Egypt.

Finally, there are private schools. Unfortunately, statistics are not published regularly on Egypt's more than sixteen hundred private schools, which are under the nominal supervision of the Ministry of Education. Often criticized for their high costs and occasionally nontraditional curricula (some private schools offer subjects like horseback riding or Montessori-type programs),^[53] private schools are popular with Egyptian families who can afford to pay for a higher quality of education than that available at most public schools. Property owners, businessmen, military officers, and government officials are particularly likely to enroll their children in private schools, and even minor public sector employees will make extra sacrifices to scrape together tuition money. Charging tuition ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand pounds per year, private primary schools in Egypt are often language schools, offering part of their curricula exclusively in foreign languages, like the government's experimental language schools. Some of them also offer costly training that public institutions cannot afford, like computer literacy courses from very early grades. Though private schools follow the Ministry of Education's curriculum, administer standard tests, and are regularly inspected by governorate-level educational bureaucrats, they are exempt from the public school's requirement that they hire only members of the teacher's union, that is, people with degrees in education. Many private school teachers are only secondary school graduates, or have university degrees from science, arts, or commerce faculties.