This book starts by narrating a violent scene and this chapter elaborates on patterns of beating and humiliation that many readers will find disturbing. I did not, however, set out to study violence when I started this research. Instead, I wanted to understand the reproduction of authoritarianism through the forms of social control deployed in schools. I did not expect that, instead of an authoritarian project of citizenship, I would encounter a volatile environment in which physical and emotional violence constituted fundamental components of the lived citizenship of young Egyptians. I also did not expect to see such prominent forms of contestation among students across the schools. This chapter and the next unpack the forms of discipline, punishment and contestation that pervade Egyptian public schools. This chapter in particular addresses the key questions relating to violence by school authorities in Egyptian schools in its historical, social, cultural, classed and gendered dimensions. How does violent punishment vary in nature and intensity across types of schools and educational phases? Is violence particularly related to a “culture of the poor” or their structural conditions? Is violence changing in its forms or intensities How do teachers explain and situate their practices, and how do students receive and narrate them? Is violent punishment accepted by students and families, or contested and rejected? How is this violence gendered, and what constructions of masculinity and femininity does it stem from and nurture?

I first situate the question of harsh punishment in global, regional and local perspective. I then discuss the features of violent punishment in both technical and general schools together and the factors that drive them. I discuss private schools separately due to the stark difference in the forms and intensity of punishment. I then explore the links between violent punishment, the culture of the poor and debates around masculinity and violence. Through the example of a demonstration in support of violent punishment in 2011, I begin to address the distinctions between repressive/exploitative and disciplinary punishment made by students and families.

School Punishment in Perspective

The forms of violence found in schools are both physical and psychological, and usually occur together. From the initial introduction of universal education in the Global North in the nineteenth century until well into the last century, beating, humiliation and isolation were routinely used as methods of teaching and discipline (Pinheiro Reference Pinheiro2006). At home and school, corporal punishment and other forms of cruel or degrading punishment were widely favored methods of “discipline, perceived as ‘taming’ unruly children, training presumptuous children to take their ‘proper places’ in the social order and hardening unseasoned children to a difficult, brutal and abrasive world” (Pinheiro Reference Pinheiro2006). As Middleton (Reference Middleton2008) notes in the case of Britain, what now might be considered cruel was likely considered unremarkable in the early twentieth century, at a time when physical violence was a part of everyday life. Corporal punishment and the implements of such punishment were a regular part of the spectacle of power within schools (Middleton Reference Middleton2008). It has been argued that corporal punishment did not constitute the sort of individual that the state in the late twentieth century deemed appropriate, as it tended to exclude rather than include (Marshall and Marshall Reference Marshall and Marshall1997). Corporal punishment loomed remarkably large in criticisms of educational practice in early modern educational institutions, which “were perceived as poorly regulated, arbitrarily managed, abusive, ineffective, generating resistance” (Deacon Reference Deacon2006, 179). Corporal punishment was associated “with a poor economy of coercion,” that is, “the concern was less about inhumanity or violence per se and more about the kind or degree of violence that might best mould particular individuals” (Deacon Reference Deacon2006, 179–80). Studies of school punishment in countries of the Global North depict a general progression from negative to positive forms of discipline. Schools increasingly abandoned corporal punishment and resorted to other methods of discipline, such as codes of conduct, suspension and teachers’ management of student behavior inside the classroom so as to maintain safe and orderly environments conducive to effective teaching and learning (Cameron Reference Cameron2006). “Punishment in schools began to shift away from the public, the spectacular and the physically violent, to the personal, the mundane and the psychologically compelling, from ‘threats or blows’ to ‘a cold and neglectful countenance’ … The body, once made to be tortured, became something to be trained and corrected” (Deacon Reference Deacon2006, 182). Despite this general progression, however, studies of schools in the Global North often observe that children of color, boys and students who receive remedial services for disabilities are disproportionately and more severely subjected to such school discipline (for reviews, see Cameron Reference Cameron2006 and Hyman Reference Hyman1995).

While it may be tempting to think that Egyptian schools are at an earlier point in the same trajectory as countries in the Global North, most indicators point to a rise in violence in Egyptian schools in recent decades. Although corporal punishment has been a regular feature of public and private schools since the inception of modern schooling in the Middle East (see Fortna Reference Fortna2002), the level of violence and humiliation in today’s public schools in Egypt is generally seen as unprecedented. In the late 1990s, around 80 percent of the boys and 60 percent of the girls in one study reported being beaten by teachers using hands, sticks, straps, shoes and kicks (Youssef, Attia and Kamel Reference Youssef, Attia and Kamel1998). About a decade later, a study by the National Center for Social and Criminal Research (NCSCR) showed that 91 percent of noncompliant students experienced violent punishment (Yunus Reference Yunus2009). By 2010, further changes in the nature of this violence could be noted, and the topic gained media visibility and attention from commentators. A report by the Egyptian Centre for Human Rights (ECHR) on incidents of teachers committing severe violence against students listed 41 cases that had been reported in the media in one academic year, which included severe beating; the breaking of an arm, a nose or a finger; threats of pushing students out of upper floors or of beating students with shoes; stepping on their necks; hitting them with sticks; puncturing their ears, using an electric Taser; injuring their faces; slandering them and preventing them from entering school (Nasif Reference Nasif2010). According to the report, the reasons teachers gave for such violent punishment included students not understanding the material, speaking out of turn or with a classmate, excess noise in the classroom, attempts by teachers to coerce students to enroll in in-school tutoring or private lessons, students’ long hair, students’ rejection of punishment, their requests to leave early, their failure to bring the proper notebook or to do the homework, their jumping the fence or not attending morning assembly. On the other hand, official MOE regulations definitively protect students from beating and humiliation, and regular instructions to teachers, especially in recent years, point out that “physical and emotional punishment” (al-‘iqab al-badani wal-nafsi) is strictly forbidden. In fact, amendments to the 2008 Law of the Child went further to “criminalize” school violence against children, instead of leaving it subject to Ministry regulations alone. This took place in a context in which violent punishment was intensifying, and the law was little known across schools.

However, there is little systematic data on how a host of different factors affect school punishment in Egypt, from gender, teacher-training and large class sizes to whether the school has a rural or urban location. Gender however plays a clear role in these dynamics. In his work on masculinity and schooling in Jordan, Shirazi shows how the rationale for different forms of discipline is very much bound up in binary constructions of gender identity and the understanding that boys are inherently more difficult to control and require strict, firm and – depending on the teacher – physical forms of discipline in order to learn how to be respectful and “become men” (Shirazi Reference Shirazi2016, 7–8). Indeed, Herrera (Reference Herrera1992) explains in her ethnography of a preparatory school in Cairo in the 1980s that teachers make a clear distinction between male and female students and the more effective way of dealing with each one’s “nature.” Thus, girls are “shamed,” punished more verbally and embarrassed in front of their peers, while boys have to be beaten and beaten harshly, as they do not respond to “mild” punishment. In addition to gender, variations in the frequency and intensity of punishment may be related to large class sizes and low teacher qualifications, as suggested by studies in other contexts.Footnote ¹

Physical and emotional punishment of students is still by no means unique to Egyptian schools and is common in other countries of the Global South. For example, the findings of a 2007 report conducted in 13 Indian states indicated that about 65 percent of schoolchildren had suffered corporal punishment (Nagar Reference Nagar2007). This is still 26 percent less than the 91 percent figure reported for Egypt in the NCSCR study (Yunus Reference Yunus2009). In some other countries in the Global South, beatings are also common (see Pineiro Reference Pinheiro2006, Ogando Portela and Pells Reference Ogbu2015), though it is difficult to make meaningful comparisons across countries from available survey data where definitions of corporal punishmentFootnote ² and harshness are not always comparable, and intersections with social class and gender are not always examined. The disproportionate application of corporal punishment to boys and to children from less-advantaged backgrounds has however been observed in recent studies (Ogando Portela and Pells Reference Ogbu2015). With regard to the regional context, it is unlikely that the level of violent punishment in Egypt’s public schools is similar across Arab countries, although there is very little comparative research that can fully ascertain this. Anecdotal evidence suggests that current modes of punishment in Egyptian schools are not paralleled in other Arab countries such as Morocco, Tunisia or Jordan, and certainly not in the Gulf countries.

While there is no claim that the modes of punishment in the six research schools are representative of violence across Egypt’s schools, available data suggests just how commonplace these practices are. The aim of this discussion is to describe the discourses and practices that surround punishment in concrete school contexts. “Beating in schools” is the most common phrase used to describe violent school punishment in the media, public discourse and the schools themselves, so I sometimes use beating (darb) and humiliation (ihana) to denote terms that are more commonly used in the field. I did not study the interrelated phenomenon, also widely discussed in Egypt, of “violence in schools,” which reports rising levels of violence by students against teachers, against school property and against each other. I do refer however to the issues students explicitly raised around sexual harassment by male students (Chapter 4), and issues around student assertiveness after the Revolution (Chapter 7).

Beating and Humiliation in the Public Schools

Zifta (scum)Footnote ³ was the first word I heard inside a classroom in my fieldwork. Zifta was simply shouted at different corners of the room and at particular girls by the teacher in the girls’ technical school until all students were seated and quiet. Students were also told, with reference to my presence, “If we are not respectable (muhtaramin), at least we could pretend to be.” Name-calling and scolding were the main practices that many (but not all) teachers used to establish order and calm or rebuke noncompliant or underperforming students in the public schools in my presence. Real or perceived noncompliance was typically responded to with verbal humiliation: shitima – name-calling – often directed at the whole class and often extended to more general derogatory statements about the students as a whole, their future potential and their families and parents who had failed to “raise them properly.” Students were regularly called stupid, garbage, retarded or animals. “Hayawan/a” (animal), “zift/a” and “humar/a” (donkey) were the most common curses I heard – considered mild enough to use in front of a guest like myself. In one class in the boys’ general school, a teacher who often used beating, kicking and derogatory language and gestures with students, simply called out the names of all the students, using “il-hayawan” before each one: the animal Ahmed, the animal Fadi and so on. This was not in response to any individual or collective offense, but simply to summon them to the front of the class to collect their medical insurance cards. Violent physical and emotional punishment has become a prominent and normalized aspect of student experiences. The statement in the beginning of this section by a student in the boys’ technical school was made in a more general conversation on the school, where the spontaneous translation of “no education” is also that classroom interaction is reduced to violence. This is not a legacy of secondary schools alone. In fact, students and teachers agreed that beating is more common for younger students in earlier grades. These observations are confirmed by a rare nationwide survey in 2012 (ELMPS 2012).Footnote ⁴

In the two boys’ public schools and, to a lesser extent in the girls’ schools, many teachers also carried around hard plastic hoses or medium-sized canes (roughly a meter in length). They used them in the courtyard, corridors and classrooms. Others used their hands and legs to deal with noncompliant students. Although students frequently remarked that beating and humiliation were considerably reduced in my presence, in the boys’ technical school, students were still slapped on the face and harshly beaten in my presence, as in the incident narrated in the opening of the Introduction chapter. Furthermore, if the principal was made aware of student noncompliance, students also risked enduring his courtyard drills as an additional punishment, consisting of sets of challenging squats and physical exercises.

In the girls’ schools, the use of humiliation was common, but physical beating took different and less severe forms. Teachers in the girls’ public schools responded to student noncompliance with punishments that ranged from name-calling, twisting the student’s ear or hitting her on the back or shoulder to calling her parents and sending her to the principal. As a student in a girls’ technical school put it, “they always hit and never talk gently … They talk with their hands or hit with the stick.” While some teachers reportedly slapped students on the face, threats of slapping and the general use of intimidating language and gestures were more common. Pulling scarves off the girls and punching them in the shoulder was far more common than actually slapping the face or the harsher beating I witnessed and was informed of in the boys’ schools. According to female students, the major causes of punishment were girls’ perceived immodesty, nonpayment of tutoring fees, the personality of the teacher, classroom disturbances and efforts to deter students’ complaints.

Although the clearest distinction was gender, with beating being disproportionately applied to boys and the policing of sexuality used with girls, social class was a major determinant of the frequency and severity of punishment between technical and general schools, but importantly within each school as well. Students who came from more affluent or better-connected families were typically afforded better treatment, including the children of schoolteachers. In both technical schools, students who paid their in-school tutoring fees regularly and enrolled early were spared the related abuse. The difference between technical and general schools was also clear. Humiliation and derogatory language were less pronounced in the general schools. Students in the girls’ general schools recounted, for example, that one teacher told them when they asked him to explain something. He said, “You will not understand more than this … this is your level.” Derogatory language took a less-severe form than “animal” and “scum,” although curse words were not uncommon. It was often remarked that students in private schools were not similarly beaten or humiliated. Students articulated dignified treatment as something afforded to those who had the means to pay for it; explicitly portraying the disrespect of teachers as premised on their class status. As students in the girls’ general school put it, “teachers treat us as though they are above us,” “they treat us as though we are from the street,” and “they look down on us.” Indeed, one of the reasons students sometimes gave for their entitlement to greater respect was not that this was their right as citizens, students or human beings: It was the possibility that they were not, in fact, destined to low social status as their teachers assumed. As one student put it, “they should not treat us this way … maybe we will graduate and become doctors.” Most were aware, however, that such prospects were limited indeed.

Apart from these clear gender and class dimensions, emotional and physical punishment were “informalized” and arbitrary, rather than part of a codified regulation. It was dependent on a number of factors and patterns of exchange in the school context, including student age, personal relations, family background and enrollment in private tutoring with the teacher. It therefore did not represent the same kind of grievance for all students. This added a critical element of arbitrariness or ambiguity in the extralegal application of punishment. For example, the older and more assertive third secondary students in the boys’ technical school were notably spared some of the harsher humiliation and beating that many first and second secondary students endured. Teachers were also less able to pressure them into enrolling into tutoring groups (as reflected in their lower enrollment in tutoring discussed in Chapter 2) or to coerce them to perform additional chores in the school. A few students implied that their fathers were able to intimidate teachers in order to deter them from too much aggression. Orphaned students or those whose fathers had left the household were seen as being the worst off in this regard. Active mothers could still intervene and plead for better treatment or fewer financial demands on their children. In the general schools especially, students who excelled in traditional (non-oppositional) areas of religious learning such as Quranic recitation also tended to receive better treatment. This was true of high-achieving students, even though their numbers were limited in all four schools, and they significantly overlapped with the previous categories of more privileged students and children of teachers. Yet others had privileged positions due to their relationships with particular teachers, won by running errands for them or otherwise gaining their favor.

Finally, most public school students did not depict physical punishment as reprehensible per se. They focused on explaining it as arbitrary and unfair, and ascribed its occurrence to discrimination based on social class, financial exchanges or compliance with extralegal demands. This indicates the normalization of violent punishment in schools and in household settings – perhaps in around 40 percent of households, as can be inferred from the NCSCR study (Yusuf Reference Amin2009). Many parents see physical and emotional violence as an effective and normal child-rearing practice in many parts of the Arab world (Fernea Reference Fernea1995).Footnote ⁵ Indeed, students in the public schools frequently confided that their parents treated them in disparaging and insulting ways, calling them stupid and failures with little potential for success.Footnote ⁶ An important line of defense for students was therefore to insist that teachers were not like parents. This insistence also served to counter religious arguments that beating by teachers was sanctioned by Islam by analogy with its (supposed) sanctioning for parents.

The Drivers of Violent Punishment

Why were beating and humiliation normalized in the public schools? What generated the perceived increase in the use and severity of emotional and physical punishment? Was it really a question of middle-class teachers looking down on working-class students? How did teachers explain beating? Were they simply reacting to the increasing disrespect, noncompliance and violence they perceived among students? Harsh punishment had different motivators and purposes for teachers and was critical to facilitating other extralegal practices, like private tutoring. As shown in Chapter 2, excessive emphasis on compliance and order was used by many teachers to waste class time, thus increasing student dependence and generating a demand for their own private tutoring services. In the technical schools, noncompliance with official uniforms or other regulations was used as a pretext to harass those students who had not yet enrolled in tutoring.

There were, however, other extralegal practices that harsh punishment and the threat of punishment could facilitate. In both technical schools, students were often forced to clean the labs and perform other chores in the school. In the boys’ technical school especially, students were made to sweep the floors and asked to carry out different tasks, such as making tea for the teachers and running private errands for them. Boys particularly resented being compelled to clean the floors and were fully aware that this was against official regulations. As one student remarked, “[T]hey make us sweep the floors. Is this a school for education or for sweeping and mopping?” Students also explained that they were the ones who had set up the labs and arranged the classroom furniture. This work was seen as less humiliating than cleaning floors, but it was nonetheless resented for being an extralegal means by which teachers and the school took advantage of student labor (arguably saving a portion of the contractual costs provided by the school’s affluent sponsors for this purpose). As one student commented, “[I]f I did this work in a workshop outside, I would be treated better and I would get paid.” In my presence, some teachers tried to justify these practices, arguing that it was laudable to keep one’s surroundings clean and that this was a normal practice in good schools and “abroad.” Again, these patterns were informal, arbitrary and not governed by codified rules. Not all teachers forced students to perform such chores, and not all students complied with such directives. It was clear that some students had more leeway than others in performing these chores and could actively resist being forced to do them.

Another important purpose that severe punishment served was deterring different forms of contestation by students. Students understood that those who challenged teachers or complained about them could receive especially severe punishment, and their parents would also be humiliated if they decided to intervene. This was especially true because of the extralegal, unsanctioned practices pervading the schools, which could be used in recriminations against teachers. The humiliation and derogatory attitude toward students was essential in legitimizing abuses against them and preventing them from speaking out against various forms of corruption and dysfunction in the schools. For example, referring to the practice of some teachers of making students clean the floors of the classrooms, one student in the boys’ school recounted how a teacher had failed him in the practical exam because he took a video of this practice and the kind of language she used in the classroom on his phone and threatened to expose her. He explained the teacher’s derogatory attitude and language, adding, “[S]he makes us feel hopeless” (bitya’isna). In another incident in the girls’ technical school, parents had come to the principal with a complaint against a teacher who had insulted their daughter. The principal spoke to them in a rude manner, told them they had been unable to raise their daughter properly and abused the mother in particular, instructing her not to talk during the meeting and indicating that, as the father was a respectable and reasonable man, only he should talk. The parents threatened to raise the issue at the district level, and the principal reportedly colluded with the teacher in question to fabricate a memorandum that accused the girl of being the one who had used obscene language with the teacher. Thus, not only were students humiliated if they complained, but also, if they were of modest social standing, they risked subjecting their parents to humiliation, reproach and intimidation if they had to step in to support them.

Ultimately, however, these patterns of punishment were made possible because the state did not have the will or desire to implement the official regulations that protected children from physical and emotional punishment. The majority of beatings in schools happen with complete impunity and the full approval of the school authorities. Teachers’ actions are almost never questioned unless parents take their grievances to higher educational authorities, the media or the police, as typically happens in cases where students have been seriously injured in ways that can be proven with medical reports. Parents do, however, need considerable cultural (and economic) capital for the police to show any interest in their case. Teachers were therefore fully aware that they could beat poorer students with impunity and that most students had no effective access to the law. Extralegal violence therefore went unpunished by the Ministry, and students did not have access to the means of deterring it. As one teacher (of psychology and sociology, of all subjects) in the boys’ general school told me:

Public school teachers deployed a number of interrelated discourses to articulate and justify their punishment practices. They framed beating as a means of preserving respect and authority, as appropriate for the “types” of students they had to deal with, as a form of caring and moral instruction in an extension of parental roles, as the only effectively available tool of discipline in the school system and, finally, as sanctioned by Islam. According to teachers, harsh punishment was necessary to maintain order and control. They frequently described students as “only responsive to beating” (maygush ghir bil-darb) or “not [properly] raised by their parents”. Students’ supposed poor upbringing and noncompliance were typical justifications for the use of severe punishment. For example, during a lesson given by one particularly harsh teacher in the boys’ technical school, students were disruptive throughout her class, as she continued to punish them verbally and physically. She later explained to me that “animals have to be treated like animals” and that if the students were human, she would treat them as such. In the subsequent class with a different teacher, the same students hardly engaged in challenging or noncompliant behavior. The next teacher was strict, but used very little verbal or physical punishment. She stuck to the material she was teaching and did not seem to be wasting class time. It seemed that violent punishment and humiliation were not needed to ensure the compliance or respect of technical school boys. In fact, one could say that such punishment only led to more disruption and noncompliance.

It has been argued, however, that harsh and humiliating treatment is essentially applied to teachers themselves and might be driving their reproduction of violence in the classroom. In his ethnography of preparatory schools in Alexandria, Naguib (Reference Naguib, Herrera and Torres2006) has presented a vivid image of how the oppressive structure within the classroom extends upward into a punitive, oppressive and humiliating relationship between teachers and principals and between school principals and those higher up in the hierarchy of the educational system. The absolute power of the principal was frequently maintained through intimidation and humiliation not through codes of conduct, but rather through unwritten codes of silence and obedience (Naguib Reference Naguib, Herrera and Torres2006). These patterns may have led to teachers being harsh with students and resorting to various extralegal practices. For example, if teachers are held accountable and harshly rebuked for classroom cleanliness even if insufficient cleaning staff are employed and properly paid, they have an incentive to extralegally force students to perform such tasks. As described in Chapter 2, this kind of punitive under-resourced institutional setting also informs permissive practices such as the facilitation of cheating, the presentation of inaccurate attendance data and reporting on other school information and supposed activities to appease supervisors and inspectors. Teachers also frequently argued that beating was necessary because the system had deprived them of all other disciplinary measures, an issue that is revisited in Chapter 4.

As a first and last line of defense, public school teachers frequently argued that beating was sanctioned by shar’ (Islamic jurisprudence), and they often explicitly challenged its prohibition by the Ministry on those grounds. Because (light) beating of children by parents to promote observance of their daily prayers can be interpreted as sanctioned based on a reported saying of Prophet Muhammad, teachers in public schools reasoned that they were entitled, by analogy, to beat students to instill in them a proper moral upbringing. By contrast, to counter what they saw as “savage” and “thuggish” practices in public schools, teachers in private schools frequently resorted to other readings of Islamic teachings that placed great limits on beating and humiliation of the young. As one private school teacher explained, “Beating was allowed in my day, but it was a certain number of strikes, on the hand only, and the teacher never resorted to beating without prior warning and repetition of mistakes. But the beating of students on the nape of the neck and kicking them (darb al-talib bil-‘afa wil-shalut) … these are thuggish practices that people do not commit in the streets, let alone be practiced in institutions for the upbringing of young people.” A number of teachers I met reacted particularly strongly to the use of religious justifications for beating by public school teachers, elaborating on how they understood the religious sanction for beating and how it related to practices in public schools. As one teacher put it, “shar’ does not sanction beating … this is an incorrect use of religion. These teachers say it is sanctioned by shar’ just so that no one objects. The basis of education in Islam is dignity, so how can there be dignity with beating? This issue of beating in the schools is a disgusting habit that they falsely attribute to religion.” Another religiously learned teacher in a private school reacted by elaborating on the restrictions on beating in Islamic jurisprudence: that it should not be severe, that it never be on the face and that it never be perpetrated against children younger than 10 years of age. He added that the only clear sanction for smacking children was to encourage them to practice their religious obligations beyond the age of 10, not for other reasons. He added: “I personally do not think in any way that a jurist would sanction what happens in Egypt’s public schools. This is torture, not beating.” These attitudes by private school teachers already introduce us to patterns of punishment in private schools, although they still do not reveal many of the subtleties and complexities of these patterns.

Before moving on to private schools, one final note is warranted. In describing such routine forms of beating and humiliation, I do not seek to portray technical schools, or public schools more generally, as spaces of violence alone. As I argue throughout this book, repression and permissiveness go hand in hand as features of everyday governance, and arbitrariness, informality and idiosyncrasies always complicate how these modes of governance are lived. For most students, there was always time to chat, to jump the fence, to play soccer or to escape class by running an errand for a teacher, sometimes even being allowed to ride his motorcycle. There was also complicity, leniency, the sharing of jokes, ringtones and religious sermons (and sometimes sexually explicit material between teachers and male students). There are meaningful differences in the prevalence and severity of punishment among teachers, as well as in their engagement in other extralegal practices, as seen in the examples given earlier. Female teachers and teachers of higher socioeconomic backgrounds were seen as less likely to engage in harsh and humiliating punishment. There were teachers who showed compassion for the orphaned or poorer students, and always one or two teachers who encouraged and believed in hard-working students and showed respect for students as a whole. Students in these classes were typically more compliant. To address noncompliant behavior, one of those teachers would say, “Miss, concentrate here please” (ya anisa, rakkizi hina min fadlik), while another called out, “Mister, sir, respectable” (ya ustaz, ya afandim, ya muhtaram), to attract their attention and rebuke them. Mrs. Mirvat, a teacher in the girls’ general secondary school (see Chapter 2), called students “my daughter” (ya binti) and sometimes preceded their names with “Miss” (in English). At least one teacher in the girls’ general school actively attempted to help students “believe in themselves” and their power to become “successful” by getting them to believe that they can achieve whatever they want, and organized school seminars based on motivational themes (“you are what you believe”). I also did not encounter the type of graphic and pathological practices that occasionally get reported in the national media or circulate on social media.Footnote ⁷ Finally, in more affluent neighborhoods across the country, and especially in the semi-private experimental schools, students are likely to experience less severe punishment and better education than in regular public schools.Footnote ⁸

Disciplining and Shaming in the Private Schools

In the two private schools, the physical punishment of students was the exception rather than the rule. Aside from the fact that the schools were a relaxed space only occasionally frequented by students for reasons other than learning (see Chapter 2), the style of punishment of the public schools was simply unthinkable. School authorities themselves explicitly rejected it. The parents of these students also possess the material and cultural resources to bring to bear if abuse does occur against their children. This does not mean that beating and humiliation were completely absent in these schools. Patterns of physical and emotional punishment were telling in terms of the neoliberal ethos that governed teacher and student discourses and practices. The practices of Mr. Samir and Mrs. Samia are good examples of the style of physical and emotional punishment that can be found in upper-range private schools.

Students were so afraid of Mr. Samir that some reported panicking when they saw his cup of tea being brought in by the cleaner, signaling his imminent arrival. Mr. Samir was a strict physics teacher who was also a “star tutor” (see Chapter 2). He offered rigorous training in a difficult subject that would help students achieve the higher scores needed for admission into prestigious colleges. His punishment was also gendered and discretionary. While he did not physically punish female students, he often used rude remarks and derogatory language to keep students in check (these were still mild compared to public schools). As he told me, he knew which students he could shout at or call “rotten” (m‘afina) and which ones he could not. For him, students understood these insults as endearing, funny and a sign of care, so much so that some girls would ask him if he were upset with them if he did not call them names as he usually did. He and other private school teachers did hit students, especially boys. Usually this consisted of punching students on the shoulder or back, which is not considered humiliating. Most of his punishment was related to academic performance, although disruptive behavior was not tolerated either. In other words, his punishments were meted out for “disciplinary” purposes. They were aimed at advancing academic performance and securing a focused and orderly learning environment. He took pride in his power to intimidate students, which established him as a feared and elevated authority. Perhaps like a tough sports coach, his style also effectively scared, motivated and shamed students to perform the hard work needed to obtain high scores. It was part of his entrepreneurial profile and the disciplinary project he was embodying. Indeed his harsh attitude was part of the appeal of the service he provided. Students often noted they found this method effective in making them study (as evidenced by his popularity as a star tutor).

Mrs. Samia, on the other hand, generated far less fear and deference on the part of students. She used derogatory language and insults, but did so jokingly and with feigned anger. Throughout her classes, she would make remarks (in English) such as “very bad behavior … you are not human beings”; “I think I’ve come to a zoo”; or “Here we have a visitor [referring to my presence] … She is here to see your stupidity.” Throughout the class, students were portrayed as not “civilized,” refined or industrious enough. This was seen as endearing and funny by some students, some of whom even tried to provoke her further, but it was ignored and perhaps disliked by others. In Mrs. Samia’s classes, students displayed the same limited interest and compliance they showed for most other teachers because they enrolled in tutoring in most subjects. Additionally, like Ms. Huda in Chapter 2, Mrs. Samia taught High Level English, a subject that did not affect students’ final scores. She was not teaching a supposedly important subject like Mr. Samir, was not a millionaire star tutor and could not rely on similar incentives and pressures for students to remain attentive. Her subject was paradoxically declining in prestige despite the importance of English language competence for her students (see Chapter 2). She may well have been dealing with her own frustration at the declining importance and status given to her subject, her own meager income relative to other teachers who offered tutoring and, more generally, the diminished authority and audience for the school’s civilizing role in the production of refined subjects.

Clearly, there were fundamental differences between the disciplinary styles of even the harsher private school teachers and the beatings and obscenities used in the public schools. The underlying assumption in the private schools was not that beating is legitimate and does not need justification, but rather the contrary. For example, whereas teachers in public schools explained beating in terms of poor student upbringing, Mr. Samir told me, “I am impolite, and everyone will tell you this.” He also offered students a highly valued service that was believed to greatly enhance their chances of success. It was not at all clear what public schoolteachers offered. Importantly, he taught the same way at school as he did in his private tutoring, placing him in that special category of “conscientious teachers” (see Chapter 2).Footnote ⁹ He explained diligently, did not waste class time and provided a high level of instruction. He did not need to withhold information to build up a clientele among students: He was already a sought-after star with a long waiting list. He had plenty of financial and moral capital to obviate any dependence on severity in order to extract resources from students or to encourage their enrollment in his tutoring classes. His severity was “disciplinary” and not seen as being in pursuit of personal gain.

Violent Punishment, Poverty and Masculinity

If violent punishment was so limited in private schools, was it simply part of the culture of the poor – an acceptable social practice among vast segments of the population that simply found an expression in schools? Is this violence caused by poverty itself? Without ignoring the role of the state in deepening this violence, it is necessary to acknowledge the link between harsh punishment and structural inequalities in the form of poverty. Studies from India (Kumar Reference Kumar2005, Proctor Reference Proctor2015) and Brazil (Goldstein Reference Goldstein2003), literature on child-rearing in the UK (Walkerdine and Lucey Reference Walker1989, Gillies Reference Gillies2008) and a large body of empirical studies in the United States (see Straus Reference Straus2000, Dietz Reference Dietz2000) all establish a link between harsh forms of punishment directed at children (and women) and social class or “structural stress.” Different studies have concluded that a clear relationship exists between the resources held by parents and the child-rearing practices they pursue (Gillies Reference Gillies2008). Walkerdine and Lucey’s (Reference Walker1989) classic, Democracy in the Kitchen, emphasizes how middle-class child-rearing practices of “sensitive mothering” are articulated as normal and desirable through the language of developmental psychology. As such, they are accepted as self-evident markers of “good parenting,” particularly when compared with representations of ignorant, insensitive working-class practices (Walkerdine and Lucey Reference Walker1989, 102). Walkerdine and Lucey, however, showed how styles of parenting that are more democratic, dialogic, “involved” or “sensitive” reflect not only distinctly middle-class values but also middle-class resources and possibilities. Research on parenting in working- and middle-class families in the UK suggests that children who are encouraged to reason and negotiate can become assertive and defiant (Gillies Reference Gillies2008). While this might be considered precious or self-assured for a middle-class child, outspoken working-class children are likely to be viewed as dangerous and their assertiveness as having severe consequences (Gillies Reference Gillies2008, 107, see also Baumrind Reference Baumrind1991).Footnote ¹⁰

Other studies have similarly suggested that the same set of behaviors or attributes could be evaluated by the school according to the social class of their bearers: assertive behavior from middle-class girls being met with approval but seen as “troublemaking” from working-class girls (Walker Reference Talbani1989, 267). Studies in the sociology of education have long emphasized the ways in which students from different social classes are taught different skills in schools. Bowles and Gintis (Reference Bowles and Gintis1976), for example, have argued that students from different social class backgrounds are rewarded for classroom behavior that corresponded to personality traits allegedly rewarded in the different occupational strata – the working classes for docility and obedience, the managerial classes for initiative and personal assertiveness. The virtues of compliance and submission to direct orders are emphasized to disadvantaged children, while middle-class children are socialized in school to be independent and autonomous and to internalize control (Da Silva Reference Da Silva1988, Hempel-Jorgensen Reference Hempel-Jorgensen2009, Ivinson and Duveen Reference Ivinson, Duveen, Moore, Arnot, Beck and Daniels2006).

Such negative perceptions of assertiveness are one factor that may drive working-class parents to nurture different qualities in their children, but poverty itself drives such practices in additional ways. For some working-class parents, the use of relatively harsh disciplinary strategies could be related to a belief that their children “must become strong individuals in order to survive the risks and demands of inner-city life” (Holloway et al. Reference Holloway, Fuller, Rambaud and Eggers-Pierola1997, see also Goldstein Reference Goldstein2003). Extreme poverty also creates a variety of stressors that reduce parents’ resources and abilities to raise their children in a caring, supportive and involved manner because, in many such cases, parents are absent, work long hours, must deal with multiple anxieties and lack the capacity to be supportive (Currie Reference Currie1998). In fact, it has been suggested that the level of stress a parent experiences is lessened by the parent’s belief that corporal punishment is valuable (Crouch and Behl Reference Crouch and Behl2001).

It is also critical in the case of Egypt to appreciate that the normalized deployment of violent punishment in schools may not be surprising where physical and emotional violence are common features of social relations in the home, workplace and public sphere. Parents and teachers, especially men, have to deal not only with the stress, uncertainty and deprivations linked to poverty but also with everyday patterns of repression and humiliation in their encounters with the state. In her study of the production and control of social space in new urban quarters in Cairo, Salwa Ismail draws out the humiliation of young men in encounters with the everyday state, which is “embodied especially in such police tactics as roughing up, beating, and slapping” (Reference Isin, Turner, Isin and Turner2006, 123). In his ethnography of state-owned textile companies in Alexandria, Shehata (Reference Shehata2003) describes the absolute concentration of power and repression in the hands of the top manager, and the regular use of humiliation, intimidation and even physical violence in highly delineated hierarchical relations within the factory. Shehata (Reference Shehata2003, Reference Shehata2009) describes the existence of an ideology justifying inequality and authoritarian social relations within the factory, where managers as well as many workers believed that superiors needed to be tough and distant and, in some cases, abusive and condescending to be respected. This expression of social distance and hierarchy recalls the ways in which Foucault linked punishment with the superiority of the sovereign (Foucault Reference Foucault1977). In the premodern state, as well as the modern household, corporal punishment is deployed as a means of avenging perceived contempt for an authority figure (Westlund Reference Westlund1999).

If teachers treated their children in the same manner as they treated students, beating could be seen as a social norm that penetrates the school and overrides school regulations. However, there was frequently a class difference between teachers and students in the public schools, and many teachers saw themselves as coming from a higher social class than their students (except for teachers of practical or technical subjects in the technical school). This might imply that they may have treated their own children with significantly less violence and greater respect. Many of them certainly enrolled their own children in private or experimental schools where they were not beaten or humiliated in the same manner. The aforementioned study by the Egyptian National Center for Social and Criminal Research, which indicated that over 91 percent of noncompliant students experienced violent punishment, also showed that about 40 percent of families believed in violence as a means of education and upbringing (Yunus Reference Yunus2009). Although more detailed and recent studies are needed, these rates suggest that teachers apply vastly more punishment to students than families do. Recent ethnographic research in popular neighborhoods in Cairo also suggests that violence at home, even in poorer homes, is far less severe than these forms of violence in poor schools, and its frequent use is discouraged and negatively viewed (Ghannam Reference Ghannam2013).Footnote ¹¹

In sum, these patterns of punishment are an expression of structural stress, as much as they are by-products of the regime’s social policy, its style of governance and its strategies of legitimation. The structural violence of poverty, precarity and blocked opportunities, as well as the everyday violence of the police and state authorities, against men especially, are preserved and extended into these violent practices against students. The male students then release this violence not only on other male students in line with the commonly described trends of rising violence in schools, but also on teachers who are perceived to be weak and on girls and women. In the public sphere and in the context of the schools, the most obvious form of violence by students against women takes the form of sexual harassment, threatening behavior and verbal aggression toward female students, as described in Chapter 4. As Bourdieu puts it, one “cannot cheat with the law of the conservation of violence: all violence is paid for … The structural violence exerted by the financial markets, in the form of layoffs, loss of security, etc., is matched sooner or later in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, a whole host of minor and major everyday acts of violence” (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieru1998, 40, original emphasis). Teachers become convinced that they must act in violent and even in arbitrary, volatile and intimidating ways in order to avoid being perceived as weak or being subjected to humiliation or violence. A vicious cycle of harsh punishment creates violent retaliation, legitimizes the use of violence and reinforces the perceived need for harsh punishment.

The link between masculinity and the harsh practices of male teachers must also be nuanced. Different scholars have shown how violence can occupy a prominent place in constructions of masculinity (Kandiyoti Reference Kandiyoti, Cornwall and Lindisfarne1994, Connell and Connell Reference Connell and Connell2000). Physical punishment in schools is not only disproportionately experienced by boys but is also more frequently – and almost exclusively in its severe forms – administered by men. It is therefore arguably part of a distinctly masculine discourse or masculinity training, where physical dominance becomes central in the construction of masculinity. Bringing up boys using corporal punishment can be a “way of claiming or asserting masculinity” (Connell Reference Connell1995, 83, Moore Reference Moore1994). The disproportionate use of beating by male teachers may, therefore, be related to a sense of vulnerability in the face of a perceived assault on their masculinity due to the various stressors to which they are subjected. In this sense, every humiliating encounter with higher education authorities or wider forms of abuse by the police or agents of the state might drive male teachers and parents to reassert their sense of dominance through violence in the classroom. This assertion of domination is also expressed in terms of the control of female modesty in girls’ schools, as described in Chapter 4.

For male teachers in particular (the key perpetrators of the more severe forms of beating), low wages undermine their claims to performing ideal masculinities as primary breadwinners. Being unable to provide for their families (nuclear as well as extended) injures ideal masculinities in ways that do not apply to women. This bears strongly on the greater frustration that male teachers may feel and the greater pressure to secure additional funds, even if this includes involvement in harsh or morally questionable practices. Manhood is also defined around certain forms of integrity and independence in income generation, increasing the frustration of male teachers in failing to adhere to the various dictates of masculinity.Footnote ¹² As explained in a lesson in one of the textbooks, a “real man” does not use his public office to extract additional resources.Footnote ¹³ Kamal Naguib has in fact used the language of impotence in describing the situation in which many teachers find themselves, arguing that they experience three levels of “impotence”: social and economic impotence stemming from their low salaries, which prevent them from earning a decent living; creative impotence because they have little autonomy in the classroom and are subject to surveillance and institutional pressures; and the impotence that results from their students’ full awareness of all of these conditions (Reference Naguib, Herrera and Torres2006, 66).

A Demonstration in Support of Beating?

One incident concerning violent punishment received considerable media attention in 2011. The incident was revealed in a video of a teacher in a small community nursery in a village beating a crying child harshly and repeatedly, while pulling her hair and also beating other children on their hands, backs, heads and feet. The video was widely viewed on social media and received considerable news coverage, leading to significant public outrage and condemnation. Especially in the exceptional context immediately following the uprising, this brought about a swift official response in the form of the suspension of the teacher and the announcement of the closure of the daycare center. However, reporters covering the incident were confronted with a gathering of the mothers and their children outside the closed kindergarten in a demonstration of sorts. The parents were expressing their support for the teacher – who was also the manager of the nursery (and likely a local notable) – calling for his release from police custody and for the reopening of the nursery. They also emphasized that the beating happened with their full approval.

Although it could be inferred from the chant they were repeating, “We want the nursery,” that their main concern was that the daycare center remain open, they did explicitly support the teacher’s beating of their children. In interviews with the media, they also referred to how they themselves punished their children. As one mother put it, “I myself beat him to death by the time he gets to the nursery.” Another parent explained to the reporter from the capital that beating was necessary given the “nature” of the rural child: “[W]e are here in a rural area, children are a bit stubborn … beat the child, it’s OK. What’s important is that he comes out educated.” The young child who was seen being beaten in the video was actually interviewed by the media as well. She said, possibly instructed by her elders, that the teacher was beating them because they had not done their homework, but that he loved them and brought them sweets. Another older child accounted for the incident in this way: “[T]he basis of education is beating, but not with this cruelty,” adding, however, that “just as there is beating, there were also means of education and entertainment” in the center. If a daycare center run by a charitable organization was the only outlet available to the community’s children, parents may have been forced to support these practices publicly and maintain that beating was a positive practice. These discourses do, however, confirm that beating for the sake of promoting learning (harsh but “disciplinary’” punishment) and beating in the context of the provision of other forms of care were accepted by many parents. As Ghannam has shown, “measured and deployed for a socially acceptable reason, the use of violence is sanctioned. When used to uphold social norms and cultivate proper men and women, violence is positively viewed” (Reference Ghannam2013, 114). Children, for their part, explicitly recognized beating as the norm in educational settings, but saw it as balanced by other forms of provision. It is still worth noting that, even in the context of an orchestrated attempt to save the daycare center, some small children spoke out against corporal punishment that is unnecessarily cruel.

This incident can help us understand why beating had become so contested in Egyptian schools. Neither effective learning nor other forms of care or respect framed its exercise in the majority of public schools. Contestation of punishment has intensified because of the demise of other features of respect in the schools. Studies show that disadvantaged students especially tend to define respect broadly as teachers caring for them and having positive expectations of them (Davidson Reference Davidson1999). “Students believe they are respected when adults challenge them to succeed academically, give attention to their particularities and commonalities, are responsive to their needs and foster positive expectations” (C.A.R.E: Challenge, Attention, Responsiveness, and Expectation) (Hajii Reference Hajii2006, 66). Indeed, students across the schools valued and were responsive to teachers’ respect in terms of both fulfillment of their duties to teach well in class and not coerce students into tutoring, and teacher encouragement or consideration for their circumstances. It is in this light that the harsh practices of some teachers are accepted, but not those of others. Even in private schools, Mr. Samir’s “impoliteness” was tolerated and even reportedly found endearing by many students. Mr. Samir had very high expectations of his students and provided them with a quality of instruction that was considered one of the best in the country. No claim is made that his punishment is wholly benign or without negative emotional consequences, at least for some students. His punishment techniques could be understood as being part of both a “disciplinary project” and an educational endeavor in which the subject matter was actually taught to students, who then had real prospects of competing for university places based on their marks. Contestation of beating has increased in schools because, as parents explained in the pro-beating demonstration, beating can be acceptable only “if the child gets educated.” Chapter 7 explains how some of these issues played out several years after the Revolution.

Conclusion

If zifta was the very first word I heard in a classroom in my fieldwork in the girls’ technical school and my introduction to the constant rituals of humiliation in the public schools, the closing of my fieldwork in the girls’ general school was an incident that highlighted the modes of disentitlement normalized in the schools. It brought home the meanings of degraded citizenship and the ways in which it is nurtured and legitimized. This was a situation in which one of the most “conscientious,” respectful and caring teachers in the school (Mrs. Mirvat; see also Chapters 2 and 4) told me the students did not deserve the computer-based English language course I had bought for them and for which they had asked me a number of times. Having always been warm with me, on that last day she rebuked me for buying the course, arguing that students were not serious about their request, nor had the will to make use of the material, nor to really develop their English language skills. She preferred to take the course and then give it to some serious students in a gradual manner. For her part, the school principal effectively prevented me from sharing the course with either the students or the teachers. She seemed appalled that I had sought to bypass her and simply democratize student and teacher access to this special resource by allowing them to make direct copies of the digital material. Her response was harsh and immediate. She not only prevented me from meeting the students again but also effectively asked me to leave the school. The principal probably initially understood the present to be a personal gift (even if presented under the guise of a gift to the school) and was shocked at my social incompetence or perceived disrespect.Footnote ¹⁴ Students themselves had no doubt that the course would not be shared with them if it went through the principal. However, they also seemed disappointed that I had not realized this on my own. I had come face to face with the norms of entitlement, power and hierarchy in the school. My minimal gesture of gratitude and educational support was too offensive to the personalized hierarchical clientelism through which resources were meant to be dispersed in the school.Footnote ¹⁵ On a methodological note, it is only when the norms of the field are broken that they show themselves most vividly to researchers. On my last day at the school, I had still not understood the school. I had so blatantly violated its norms and disappointed its different actors. This was a humbling reminder of our limited knowledge of any given field and of the long process of understanding that evolves slowly as we break and uphold rules, discuss and disagree, compare, read and theorize.