Severe traditional schooling could push Egyptian village boys toward alternative careers

Evidence

This extraordinary engineer, historian, and educator had a difficult time finding either his calling or the right path to a solid education. As Mubärak describes it, his first mualim (teacher), who taught him and other local children in his home, filled him with such fear that he could barely learn the Qur´an, and his difficulties resulted in terrible beatings.This situation lasted for two years, until he could tolerate no more and returned to his father’s house in the village of Birnabal. When his father, fearful that Alï Mubärak would lose what little education he had gained, tried to return his son to the same teacher, the boy refused and threatened to run away for good. In his account of his childhood, `Alï Mubärak describes himself turning this way and that, making new choices, with his father at wit’s end trying both to please and raise his willful, intelligent son. Conceding that a traditional education would not work, his father agreed to apprentice him to a local clerk. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 251

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial schools imposed age-graded time alien to traditional education — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 498; Egypt’s national schools aimed to create disciplined civilians, not soldiers — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 234; Failed progressive initiatives swing working-class hopes toward traditionalist education policies — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1127
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Colonial schools imposed age-graded time alien to traditional education — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 498; Egypt’s national schools aimed to create disciplined civilians, not soldiers — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 234; Failed progressive initiatives swing working-class hopes toward traditionalist education policies — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1127