Few
items are worth investigating in order to qualify the claim that Egypt
has shut its door to western culture during 1952-1967 era. Here
are some examples:
1) How
much money the Egyptian government spent on students acquiring higher education
abroad before and after 1952?
2) What was the process
of sending qualified students aboard? What was the target countries; universities;
specialties; etc.?
3) How
much money the Egyptian government spent on the effort of translating of
foreign books, literature, etc..?
4) Before
and after 1952, what was the total number of students enrolled in
schools and what is the percentage of Egyptian students that were enrolled
in language schools per total number of students? Was it possible (numerically
or financially) that Egypt could afford to continue hiring qualified
English/French teachers in schools and universities even after the expansion
and extension of the education system?
I am
still skeptical about all of this. Here is why:
1)
We are mixing different time periods in which each has its own policy
paradigm.
2) We
are not supporting our claims with enough evidence. We might be falling
in the same trap with the Egyptian ideologists (of all kind) and the half-educated
journalists in which they generalized based on gut feelings. For example,
is there an evidence to support the claim that “Liberal Arts and
Social Sciences did not receive the appropriate attention from the government
as the physical, Mathematical, and biological sciences did”?
4) One
actually might prove the opposite by pointing to the large number of students
that went overseas to study Dance, Music, Play Writings, etc., and to the
number of culture institutions that was established in 1960s. But
again, one needs to have actual figures to prove all or any of this!
3) If
it is true that there were more students studying physical sciences, was
that a national policy or was it the job market forcing students to the
direction where jobs are?
4) Liberal
Arts and Social Sciences are not the easiest and safest way to connect
with a dominant culture, especially when you send 20 years old
“green” kids with little linguistic skills and little education of
their own culture. The very few number of people who had escaped the trap
of being overwhelmed by the dominant culture is a testimony to that. For
the last 150 years and after Rifa3a Eltahtawy, you only could
count on one hand the number of Egyptian scholars (educated in the west)
who were able to balance their views about the two cultures. Egyptian intelligentsia
has been largely clustered around the two infamous camps represented (as
proxies) by Sayed Qutb and Salama Moussa. If the rigidity
of the first camp is attributed to the lack of exposure to other cultures
(although Qutb himself is an astonishing exception), how could one
explain the extremes and rigidity of the other camp. In other word, I don’t
think that the lack of connection and exposure to other culture (if any)
was/is the reason of our problems. We need to dig a lot deeper to find
out what these problem are.
Regards to all
Youssef Hegazy,
Ph. D. |
