Teachers As State Builders

The little-known history of public school teachers across the Arab world—and how they wielded an unlikely influence over the modern Middle East Today, it is hard to imagine a time and place when public school teachers were considered among the elite strata of society. But in the lands controlled by the Ottomans, and then by the British in the early and mid-twentieth century, teachers were key players in government and leading formulators of ideologies. Drawing on archival research and oral histories, Teachers as State-Builders brings to light educators’ outsized role in shaping the politics of the modern Middle East. Hilary Falb Kalisman tells the story of the few young Arab men—and fewer young Arab women—who were lucky enough to teach public school in the territories that became Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel. Crossing Ottoman provincial and, later, Mandate and national borders for work and study, these educators were advantageously positioned to assume mid- and even high-level administrative positions in multiple government bureaucracies. All told, over one-third of the prime ministers who served in Iraq from the 1950s through the 1960s, and in Jordan from the 1940s through the early 1970s, were former public school teachers—a trend that changed only when independence, occupation, and mass education degraded the status of teaching. The first history of education across Britain’s Middle Eastern Mandates, this transnational study reframes our understanding of the profession of teaching, the connections between public education and nationalism, and the fluid politics of the interwar Middle East.

The little-known history of public school teachers across the Arab world—and how they wielded an unlikely influence over the modern Middle East Today, it is hard to imagine a time and place when public school teachers were considered among the elite strata of society. But in the lands controlled by the Ottomans, and then by the British in the early and mid-twentieth century, teachers were key players in government and leading formulators of ideologies. Drawing on archival research and oral histories, Teachers as State-Builders brings to light educators’ outsized role in shaping the politics of the modern Middle East. Hilary Falb Kalisman tells the story of the few young Arab men—and fewer young Arab women—who were lucky enough to teach public school in the territories that became Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel. Crossing Ottoman provincial and, later, Mandate and national borders for work and study, these educators were advantageously positioned to assume mid- and even high-level administrative positions in multiple government bureaucracies. All told, over one-third of the prime ministers who served in Iraq from the 1950s through the 1960s, and in Jordan from the 1940s through the early 1970s, were former public school teachers—a trend that changed only when independence, occupation, and mass education degraded the status of teaching. The first history of education across Britain’s Middle Eastern Mandates, this transnational study reframes our understanding of the profession of teaching, the connections between public education and nationalism, and the fluid politics of the interwar Middle East.

Building a New Educational State examines the dynamic process of black education reform during the Jim Crow era in North Carolina and Mississippi. Through extensive archival research, Joan Malczewski explores the initiatives of foundations and reformers at the top, the impact of their work at the state and local level, and the agency of southerners—including those in rural black communities—to demonstrate the importance of schooling to political development in the South. Along the way, Malczewski challenges us to reevaluate the relationships among political actors involved in education reform. Malczewski presents foundation leaders as self-conscious state builders and policy entrepreneurs who aimed to promote national ideals through a public system of education—efforts they believed were especially critical in the South. Black education was an important component of this national agenda. Through extensive efforts to create a more centralized and standard system of public education aimed at bringing isolated and rural black schools into the public system, schools became important places for expanding the capacity of state and local governance. Schooling provided opportunities to reorganize local communities and augment black agency in the process. When foundations realized they could not unilaterally impose their educational vision on the South, particularly in black communities, they began to collaborate with locals, thereby opening political opportunity in rural areas. Unfortunately, while foundations were effective at developing the institutional configurations necessary for education reform, they were less successful at implementing local programs consistently due to each state’s distinctive political and institutional context.

State Building in Latin America explores why some countries in the region developed effective governance, while others did not. The argument focuses on political ideas, economic geography, public administration, to account for the development of public primary education, taxation, and military mobilization in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

This book explains why many governments in Africa are including African languages alongside European languages as media of instruction in elementary schools. It argues that a number of factors have combined to make multilingual education attractive: France has changed its foreign policy toward its former colonies, language NGOs are transcribing more languages, and pressure toward democracy makes African leaders look for ways to divide the opposition.

To imagine—to see what is not there—is the startling ability that has fueled human development and innovation through the centuries. As a species we stand alone in our remarkable capacity to refashion the world after the picture in our minds. Traversing the realms of science, politics, religion, culture, philosophy, and history, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reveals the thrilling and disquieting tales of our imaginative leaps—from the first Homo sapiens to the present day. Through groundbreaking insights in cognitive science, Fernández-Armesto explores how and why we have ideas in the first place, providing a tantalizing glimpse into who we are and what we might yet accomplish. Unearthing and historical evidence, he begins by reconstructing the thoughts of our Paleolithic ancestors to reveal the subtlety and profundity of the thinking of early humans. A masterful paean to the human imagination from a wonderfully elegant thinker, Out of Our Minds shows that bad ideas are often more influential than good ones; that the oldest recoverable thoughts include some of the best; that ideas of Western origin often issued from exchanges with the wider world; and that the pace of innovative thinking is under threat.

Why did the Zapatista rebellion occur in Chiapas and not in some other state in southern Mexico where impoverished, marginalized indigenous peasants also suffer a legacy of exploitation and repression? Stephen Lewis believes the answers can be found in the 1920s and 1930s. During those critical years, Mexico's most important state- and nation-building agent, the Ministry of Public Education (SEP), struggled to introduce the reforms and institutions of the Mexican revolution in Chiapas. In 1934 the administration of president Lázaro Cárdenas endorsed "socialist" education, turning federal teachers into federal labor inspectors and promoters of agrarian reform. Teachers also attempted to "incorporate" indigenous populations and forge a more sober, "defanaticized" nationalist citizenry. SEP activism won over most mestizo communities after 1935, but enraged local ranchers, planters, and politicians unwilling to abide by the federal blueprint. In the Maya highlands, federal education was a more categorical failure and Cardenista Indian policy had unintended, even sinister consequences. By 1940 Cardenismo and SEP populism were in full retreat, even as mestizo communities came to embrace the culture of schooling and identify with the Mexican nation. Fifty years later, the delayed, incomplete, and corrupted nature of state- and nation-building in Chiapas prevented resolution of the state's most pressing problems. As Lewis concludes, the Zapatistas appropriated the federal government's discarded revolutionary nationalist discourse in 1994 and launched a rebellion that challenged the Mexican state to contemplate a plural, multi-ethnic nation.