‘Their Parents Are All Sailors and Blue-Collar Workers’: Elementary Education in the Suez Canal Region at the Turn of the Century

Abstract

This chapter examines the history of elementary education in the Suez Canal region at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on selected Egyptian, Italian, and French state and religious schools, and local private schools. These schools operated in a context of colonial and uneven cosmopolitan relations between individuals and groups of different socioeconomic status, legal standing, and geographical, religious, and linguistic backgrounds. I argue that the close interaction and competition of multiple educational providers locally, rather than official directives and politics alone, fundamentally shaped schooling in the region. In particular, through their strategies to attract students and their pedagogical choices, educational providers reinforced axes of discrimination between, while at times creating new educational opportunities for, the thousands of students attending elementary schools in the region. This chapter thus seeks to integrate our understanding of the history of education in modern Egypt into a simultaneously local and transregional perspective, and to put the students, teachers, and school directors who most closely interacted with the schools at the center of the analysis.