4 - 10 January 2001
Issue No.515
|
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 4 - 10 January 2001 Issue No.515 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Reflections:
Dear old golden rule days
Year one of the new millennium has begun and, as the end of a year evokes reflection on the past, the beginning of a new one behooves contemplation of what the future may hold. Having spent the morning of 1 January 2001 helping my nine-year-old son revise his first term Arabic curriculum, my thoughts on this country's future would have been grim indeed, had it not been for my belief in the indomitable rebelliousness of the human spirit and intellect -- a belief that my own little boy has been corroborating raucously for the past nine years.
My sense of foreboding was not, however, triggered by the timing of the mid-term exams, which has had most parents of schoolchildren howling. What I find truly frightening is the content of the curriculum itself -- and this at a time when we are told constantly of the great strides being taken in educational reform. Reports that efforts to upgrade the curriculum have been receiving American funding as well as expert intervention have, indeed, triggered dire warnings of an American conspiracy to subvert our culture and traditional values. Admittedly, I have not made a study of educational reform in this country and, in any case, cries of conspiracies to undermine our traditional values tend to leave me cold. Judging from the third-grade Arabic language curriculum, however, I can only conclude that either the reform process (with or without the benefit of American conspiracies) has yet to reach that particular rung of our educational ladder or, if it has, that the object of the reform (conspiratorial or not) is to make cretins of our children and docile imbeciles of our "leaders of the future."
As to values, my son's Arabic language textbook (glaringly mistitled: Read and Think) highlights these in each chapter under the heading "What do we learn in this lesson?" Thus, we are supposed to have learned such things as "the love of Egypt," "the upholding of noble traditions and values," and so on. As far as I could tell, the one "traditional value" that the textbook seems to uphold most consistently, if implicitly, is hypocrisy.
I have often wondered, while trying to interest my son in some children's programme on Egyptian television, whether the producers/presenters' assumption that they are addressing mindless idiots is based on their own experience of childhood or of their having totally expunged that experience from their memories. The curriculum designers and textbook authors seem to belong to the same school of thought. They cannot actually imagine that such inordinately dull, badly written, awfully illustrated and poorly designed material will convince, or rather indoctrinate (as the obvious intention is), the children it addresses. An Egyptian learns, practically at his mother's breast, that while it may be judicious to repeat such "official lines" to those who expect them, one does not have to do so with even the slightest conviction. The inescapable conclusion, then, is that the designers/authors' effort -- like that of their TV counterparts -- is actually aimed at their superiors, not the children.
The real danger, however, is not to our children's intelligence, since they thankfully manage to find other sources for their intellectual development than the school system. What is under threat is our culture and language. At a time when the Internet, satellite television and "language schools" are becoming more and more pervasive, and with a job market that makes an even superficial knowledge of English the dividing line between the employable and unemployable, the education system has united with Egyptian television to literally drive our children away from their cultural and linguistic heritage. Perhaps we should keep this in mind when we wail "cultural invasion."
Interestingly, the hidden hand of USAID and its ilk can still be detected in the third-grade Arabic language curriculum -- not through Westernisation, but via the Education Ministry's version of that golden synthesis our intellectuals have been advocating for the past two decades between tradition and modernity. Why anyone should believe that three chapters devoted to the Ministry of Social Affairs' Productive Families Project should be of educational interest to anybody, let alone third-grade schoolchildren, is beyond my comprehension. The real lesson behind the lessons, however, is child labour; gradually introduced as household labour in the three "productive families" chapters, as well as in a chapter on Egypt's various "habitats," it is forced down the children's throats in the story of Sharara and the Chain.
Sharara is an impoverished little boy who (rather peculiarly) steals a chain from an iron-monger's workshop. The chain is hot from the smelter and burns the boy's hand, who is then caught by the workshop owner. The latter, out of the goodness of his heart, decides not to report Sharara to the police, dresses his burns and advises him to seek a job at a workshop. Sharara, repentant, takes the advice and grows up to become the owner of a workshop, where we might expect him to employ other small children. The free market moral is duly validated by an appropriate saying of the Prophet, in the same way that Qur'anic verses and the Prophet's sayings were drawn upon during my own school days to validate Arab Socialism.
It is not cultural invasion we need to fear, but the debasement of all culture.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
