“Living Under Different Skies”: Misrepresenting Egyptian Education during the British Occupation in the North American Press

During the British occupation from 1882 to 1922, Egypt saw the rise of colonial educational reforms, American missionary projects, and foreign-subsidized schools. Consequently, newspapers in North America reported extensively on these colonial educational excursions. In the view of correspondents, the so-called “enlightenment” of Egyptians was dependent on their adoption of Western moral ideals and instructional models. The main criticisms levelled at Egyptian education centred on what was viewed as the “incompetence” of native instructors and schools, namely Muslim ones, as well as the need for the modern education of young women. Moreover, Christian or Western schooling was posited as the way to “civilize” these indigenous populations. Overall, these writings not only helped simultaneously construct both the “abroad” and the oppositional, superior identity of the West to readers, but also legitimated the British occupation as a whole. Therefore, journalism in North America was upholding and reinforcing a colonially-mediated representation of the realities in Egypt. In response to this misrepresentation, Egyptian writers and activists took to Western publications to dispel such denigrating narratives and appealing to readers to consider the failures of their British colonizers. This study of collected articles on Egyptian education in North American newspapers at the time reveals and deconstructs Western observers’ misrepresentations of schools and teaching and learning activities in Egypt.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Windsor

Author dc:creator

• Zantout, Shaymaa

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Shauna Huffaker

Contributors dc:contributor

• zantouts@uwindsor.ca

Statement dc:rights

• CC BY-NC-SA Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en_CA

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14776/9955

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uwindsor.scholaris.ca:20.500.14776/9955