Egypt’s dominant influence is stifling HE reform in Gaza

Egyptian education has historically had a strong influence on most Arab and Muslim countries. Due to a lack of alternatives, Egyptian education has provided a much-needed opportunity for academic and professional training for people living in the occupied Gaza Strip. However, this contribution has not always been positive in terms of the intensity of its impact on the culture of Palestinian higher education institutions.

The over-influence of Egyptian education seems also to have brought, alongside many positives, cultural patterns that are detrimental to Gaza. My research indicates that this over-influence continues to shape the higher education experience at Gaza’s universities today.

An Egyptian culture at Gaza’s universities?

The Gaza Strip was ruled by Egypt from 1948-67. Generations of school students in Gaza continued to study an Egyptian curriculum, which was irrelevant to their context, until the first Palestinian curriculum came into effect in 2001.

Under Egyptian rule, high-achieving Palestinians were also offered scholarships to study in Egypt for their undergraduate degrees. The lack of universities in Gaza prior to 1978 encouraged further enrolment in Egyptian universities.

The proximity of Egypt to Gaza and the fact that students were taught based on an Egyptian curriculum and culture through years of schooling in Gaza meant Palestinian students found it easier to continue to do their undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Egypt even after Palestinian universities were established.

In fact, at least two Palestinian universities were established on Egyptian land, with one of them being named Al Azhar, after the Al Azhar Religious Institute of Cairo.

The continued siege of the Gaza Strip as well as various language and cultural barriers have continued to limit academics’ ability to travel abroad to continue their higher education studies. Consequently, the sub-culture of Palestinian universities in Gaza remains largely Egyptian, especially with regard to the faculties that teach in the Arabic language.

For example, conducting my PhD research at the faculties of education at two of Gaza’s universities, I found out that approximately 56% and 77% of the academic staff at the two faculties of education were Egyptian university alumni. Eight out of 15 of the lecturers I interviewed from these universities had studied for at least one of their higher education degrees in Egypt.

From my experience as a lecturer in Gaza, it was also hard to find diverse library resources in the field of education as the majority of books were written by writers from Egypt or those who had studied at Egyptian universities.

Tolerated by the occupation

In his 1986 book, Palestinian Higher Education in the West Bank and Gaza, Samir N Anabtawi points out that Arab education, including Egyptian education in Gaza, was tolerated by the Israeli occupation because it was thought to instil “the same cultural and Islamic propensities which have governed Arab intellectual categories for centuries”.

Thus, the educational system in these countries is characterised by “reverence for, and subjugation to, the ruling regime”, according to Marwan Muasher. The same applies to higher education, which is based on a mindset that focuses on securing students jobs in the public sector rather than on innovation and entrepreneurship.

These graduates, having studied in traditional, controlled systems, are often not equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to improve their institutions, which means they merely reproduce traditional practices and problems in society at large.

Recently, the Arab countries have witnessed an increased enrolment in higher education and more branches of Western institutions have opened; yet Arab higher education performance in terms of research, publications, scientific education, technical and vocational training and its international rankings in league tables is still limited.

Despite greater financial support for educational reform, Muasher points out that “monetary investments have not produced the desired outcomes because the overall philosophy of education systems still runs counter to them”.

Even the potential for reform created by the advance of information and communications technology (ICT) in schools and universities has often been obstructed by untrained and autocratic educators.

The result has been a set of social and political problems for Arab countries, which have included a lack of democracy, increased dependence on foreign thinkers and production, limited economic development, radicalisation, nepotism, poverty and unemployment and an inability to compete in the global labour market.

These local grievances in Arab countries including Egypt were among the main reasons for the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring in 2010, which swept over countries in the region.

Gaza universities and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution

I conducted a five-year large-scale research project on the past and present higher education experience at Gaza’s universities and how this experience may be evolving in the shifting socio-political context in the Arab world.

The Arab Spring, and the revolution in Egypt in particular, have affected Gaza’s universities in many ways. On the negative side, after the election of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as president of Egypt, there were greater controls on the Egyptian-Gaza borders, which further restricted academic mobility and exchange activities, as well as limiting the flow of finance and resources to the universities in Gaza.

The revolutions also frustrated lecturers and students since they did not improve the political situation in Gaza.

On the positive side, young people at Gaza’s universities, influenced by the spirit of the revolutions, were longing for a change and were eager to copy the example of the youth elsewhere and take responsibility for making that change happen.

Despite this, however, they have not taken any serious steps towards reforming higher education. Under the conditions of occupation, higher education reform in Gaza did not seem a priority.

However, the very minor attempts of students to protest and voice their concerns to their university administrations were silenced, so often by students themselves as they worried that, due to the lack of alternatives in Gaza, their universities needed to remain in control of their higher education experience.

It is reported that higher education institutions offered several ‘channels’ for students to give their perspectives on a variety of issues. Although a few students found these channels useful, the majority said that they did not trust these channels or believe they were useful since their universities are traditional at heart and averse to the idea of change.

Countering the dominance of Egyptian culture

In an interview with an academic who I anonymise as Mr Mehdi UA, he pointed out the following: “In the beginning […] there was an academic conflict between two currents [:…] a traditional current, from the classic Egyptian university culture […which] belongs to the traditional era. [And the other current….] represents, to a large extent, the liberal way and includes those who learnt in the West and experienced Western universities, and went to international conferences, and wished to share this experience in Gaza.”

Nowadays in Gaza, there is more diversity in terms of academics’ backgrounds than before as more scholarships have become available to Palestinian students to continue their postgraduate studies at institutions in the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries, in addition to Egypt. Gaza universities too could be doing more to encourage this diversity.

However, these efforts remain minor compared to the scale of the problem. Also, there is a hierarchy of age in Gaza that means these young and diverse voices are under-represented in leading positions in the higher education sector.

From my first-hand experience of working in the Gaza Strip, most of those who occupy leading positions in educational institutions there are from the older generation. This article is not against Egyptian education per se. The main issue is the importance of diversity for dialogue.

In the case of the Gaza Strip, this diversity is significantly lacking. The dominance of Egyptian education in Gaza has lasted for decades and is a serious issue affecting reform, especially with regard to the faculties of education at Gaza’s universities at which school teachers are trained.

These school teachers educate the new generation and the new leaders of Palestinians in Gaza. According to a lecturer whom I anonymise as Ms Amna UA, “the greater emphasis is on [….] filling students’ minds with information. [….]. That you get high marks could be the aim of higher education for us”.

In my PhD research, I recommend that Gaza’s universities should work to recruit junior faculty members, particularly from those who have studied in a liberal environment, so as to balance the impact of Egyptian cultural dominance.

The older generation who occupy leading positions at Gaza’s universities should also encourage junior members to contribute to future policy, practice and reform. This will involve a prolonged and complicated process but one that is necessary.

Mona Jebril did her PhD at the faculty of education at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She is now a research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Business Research, working as part of the Global Challenges Research Fund project: Research for Health in Conflict.