Gender Education in ME

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This upper division course examines the history of education in modern Middle East history, with an emphasis on how gendered notions shaped the form, content, transmission, and reception of knowledge. What did educating girls/women versus boys/men mean in different societies at different historical moments? How did educational content and gendered social roles mutually reinforce – or detract – from one another? The course traces the shift from Islamic education to missionary and colonial educational institutions, to the rise of nationalist systems of pedagogy. Education is arguably the most formative aspect of a literate person’s life and has been perceived and used as an index of one’s “enlightenment,” the “modernity” of a society or nation, a harbinger of “freedom”, and as a vehicle for inculcating ideology. But what, really, does it mean to be educated? How did that change over time? What impact did the shift from an oral to written tradition have on the different societies? How is the definition of education related to notions of upbringing, knowledge, and culture? We will examine how competing notions of “modern” education influenced the rise of “secular”, Islamist, and western-oriented pedagogies, the role of the intellectual, the social, political, and cultural capital of language, and the role of gender to current discourses of educational reform in the region.