Few political ethnographies have tracked everyday realities of citizenship before and after the Arab uprisings. This chapter explains the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the study, situating it in relation to the relevant works on Egypt and the region. It sets out the approach of studying the production of lived and imagined citizenship in schools, situating the study within the sociology and anthropology of education. It identifies the key parameters for approaching lived citizenship in schools in terms of the focus on privatization and austerity on the one hand, and violence and discipline on the other. It charts how the research approaches the production of imagined citizenship in schools through analysis of textbook discourses, rituals and everyday student and teacher narratives.

The 2011 uprising is a watershed event in contemporary Egyptian history in terms of the unprecedented scale of mass protest and the historic changes that followed it. This chapter asks what changed in relation to the production of lived and imagined citizenship in schools in the tumultuous months and years following the uprising. It outlines changes in the wider political, economic and social context and maps key changes in the educational sphere, presenting novel analysis on trends in teacher salaries and public spending on education. In analyzing the research with students, teachers and stakeholders from 2016 to 2018, it updates the discussion on the themes that are methodologically and conceptually developed across Chapters 1–6 in terms of informal privatization, permissiveness and violent punishment, and maps key changes to textbooks, rituals and student narratives relating to citizenship and belonging. In particular, it highlights trends of student contestation of violent and humiliating treatment and debates around the introduction of new pro-army song in school rituals and divergent textbook treatments of the Revolution and the legitimizing narratives of the regime.

The pervasive informal privatization of public institutions seen in urban secondary schooling is a key component of the lived citizenship of different social strata. Many of the arguments in the book depend on an appreciation of the implications of pervasive private tutoring for the everyday school and for articulations of citizenship and national belonging among students. Privatization-by-tutoring affects almost every aspect of school life in Egypt, from whether students and teachers come to school or enter classrooms to whether the morning assembly ritual is performed. It is, however, the different ways in which informal tutoring markets are established within and alongside formal institutions in the three types of school that reflect the functioning of state institutions and differentiated modes of lived and imagined citizenship. The chapter dissects the trajectories, functioning and implications of informal privatization in different tiers of schooling. It explains enrollment in tutoring, its costs, the related forms of coercion, cheating, truancy, narratives of conscientious teachers and tropes of neoliberal subjectivity.

Schools reveal dominant modes of governance and legitimation. The production of lived citizenship in Egyptian schools reveals a mode of governance that I call “permissive-repressive neoliberalism” –deinstitutionalization and heightened violence in the context of privatization and austerity. This chapter considers how far these trends can be considered a reflection of neoliberalism as a global phenomenon and unpacks their implications for the functioning of schools as disciplinary institutions. It shows how schools reflect everyday legitimation by charting what school textbooks, rituals and narratives reveal about the production of imagined citizenship before and after 2011.

The forms of punishment and informal privatization in schools have wide-ranging implications for student subjectivities and practices. This chapter focuses in particular on the resulting patterns of noncompliance, failed disciplinary supervision and gendered contestation. It provides background on the wide-ranging negative consequences of harsh punishment for young people. It focuses in particular on noncompliance and its assumed links to working class education, to gender traditionalism and to assumptions about authoritarian Arab schools. It charts patterns of contestation and retaliation among girls and boys and the responses of school authorities to them, and explains the attempts of educational authorities to uphold a semblance of discipline and educational supervision. In contrast to depictions of authoritarian Arab schooling and its role in producing obedient submissive citizens, the chapter describes the collapse of this model of schooling and the kind of authoritarianism it implies in the case of Egypt. In the place of obedience or submissiveness, it highlights pervasive forms of noncompliance and illusory forms of control over schools in the context of state withdrawal and de facto privatization.

The abandoned and contentious state of nationalist rituals in schools embodies the realities of everyday legitimation reflected in the striking expressions of the lack of national belonging among students across the schools. By exploring both school rituals and student narratives, this chapter is concerned with how legitimation is lived in the everyday and how citizenship is imagined from below. The first part of the chapter discusses the organization of the morning assembly (tabur) in the different schools and the performance of its nationalist components. The second part develops the key themes that emerge from observations and interviews with students and teachers relating to the narratives of national belonging and citizenship, and their classed and gendered dimensions. It tracks the influence of Islamist narratives on school activities and everyday discourses and shows how students and teachers articulate themes of Islamism and neoliberalism.

The condition of education in Egypt is driven by the management of the socioeconomic sphere by successive regimes and their ideological and strategic directions. In the late Mubarak era, the three features of crony neoliberalization, a weak informalized state and a deficit of legitimacy shape the practices of everyday governance and legitimation examined in the schools. This chapter sketches the political and economic context of the late Mubarak era and the ideological transition from Arab socialism to neoliberal Islamism. It provides essential background on tracking, quality and equity in the education sector, especially as crystalized in secondary schooling, and outlines the historical evolution of nationalist and ideological narratives as reflected in textbooks and schools and the securitization and Islamization of education. Finally, it describes the key attributes of the research sites and respondents in the two phases of research before and after the uprising, the key methodological issues involved in conducting the research in schools, the selection and analysis of textbooks and the most significant limitations of the research.

The book starts with the description of a violent scene inside a classroom, and this chapter elaborates on patterns of beating and humiliation that many readers will find disturbing. This chapter tackles violent punishment by school authorities in Egypt in its historical, social, cultural, classed and gendered dimensions. It describes the ways in which teachers explain and situate their practices and unpacks how violent punishment might be related to a “culture” of the poor or their structural conditions and how constructions of masculinity and femininity intersect with gendered punishment and surveillance. The chapter underlines how punishment is changing in its forms and intensities, and the complex ways in which it is both accepted and contested by students and families. Through the example of a “demonstration in support of beating” in 2011, it explores the distinctions between repressive, exploitative and disciplinary punishment implicit in the discourses of students and families.

Because textbooks in Egypt are centrally developed and unified across all schools, they represent a critical resource for studying state-sponsored discourses directed at the majority of Egyptians enrolled in national education. This chapter explains how national belonging is articulated and justified in school textbooks, what national glories are celebrated and how the route to progress is articulated. It describes the place the figure of the leader, the army and Islam take up in these narratives and explores how neoliberalism and active citizenship are articulated in these narratives. The chapter highlights the striking ways in which textbook discourses have utilized Islam and their limited attempts at legitimizing the ideological directions of the regime in terms of privatization, austerity, the general neoliberal orientation or geopolitical alliances. In outlining differences between textbooks, it addresses the ways in which education functions as a space in which negotiations and accommodation take place between different social forces.