What might push someone in a position of privilege to side with the oppressed at their own expense? The peculiar setting of Western, private elite schools in Egypt offers us some answers.
Very interesting piece! I can’t speak for Egypt, but as someone who went to an international school or two in other countries… I think what opened my eyes was sustained encounters with *peers* who did not have things that I took for granted. Not saying it isn’t valuable to learn about the lives of janitors, bus drivers, etc, but I think there are other points of difference (even just the age difference) that can hinder students from feeling solidarity. Meanwhile, there’s something that happens when you encounter people your own age living in the same city having a very different experience.
For me, this happened when I joined a youth theatre group that had me together with students from the local public schools. As I got to know them and saw how different their lives and concerns were, that’s when I started to notice what a bubble we were in at the international school…
Yeah, the angle of age is one that is crucial. Unfortunately international schools tend to be homogenous as you have alluded to. The theatre group setting though offers genuine interaction and true friendship to evolve would allow for much more room for transformation, I imagine. Room for disorienting dilemmas to emerge and consequently encouraging a synthesis between the self and the other would probably further reveal the structural dynamics at play.
Maybe that’s why the curriculum never reached the level of “criticality”, its designers aimed for.
I’d be interested to know how the class dynamics in the theatre group were navigated by the students and the facilitators (or whether they had to be navigated in the first place)
Yeah. Many might even claim that it’s impossible to interrogate these dynamics.
In a weird way though, international schools in Global South settings were authoritarianism sometimes thrives are indirectly allowing for more freedom and space to engage with contentious topics. In other words their neoliberal nature carved out a space for some intellectual freedom away from the control of governments over public schooling spaces.
Very interesting piece! I can’t speak for Egypt, but as someone who went to an international school or two in other countries… I think what opened my eyes was sustained encounters with *peers* who did not have things that I took for granted. Not saying it isn’t valuable to learn about the lives of janitors, bus drivers, etc, but I think there are other points of difference (even just the age difference) that can hinder students from feeling solidarity. Meanwhile, there’s something that happens when you encounter people your own age living in the same city having a very different experience.
For me, this happened when I joined a youth theatre group that had me together with students from the local public schools. As I got to know them and saw how different their lives and concerns were, that’s when I started to notice what a bubble we were in at the international school…
Yeah, the angle of age is one that is crucial. Unfortunately international schools tend to be homogenous as you have alluded to. The theatre group setting though offers genuine interaction and true friendship to evolve would allow for much more room for transformation, I imagine. Room for disorienting dilemmas to emerge and consequently encouraging a synthesis between the self and the other would probably further reveal the structural dynamics at play.
Maybe that’s why the curriculum never reached the level of “criticality”, its designers aimed for.
I’d be interested to know how the class dynamics in the theatre group were navigated by the students and the facilitators (or whether they had to be navigated in the first place)
Yeah. Many might even claim that it’s impossible to interrogate these dynamics.
In a weird way though, international schools in Global South settings were authoritarianism sometimes thrives are indirectly allowing for more freedom and space to engage with contentious topics. In other words their neoliberal nature carved out a space for some intellectual freedom away from the control of governments over public schooling spaces.