Women in the Nationalist-Educational Prism: Turkish and Egyptian Pedagogues and their Gendered Agenda, 1920–1952

Abstract

The use of schooling to support various societal agendas has attracted much attention among the last generation of global education scholars. Whether as a neo-Marxian “ideological state apparatus,” through which societal elites seek to preserve socioeconomic inequity, or as a means for regimes to acquire sociopolitical legitimacy, the dynamics of education's unique socializing role have proven quite intriguing. In particular, new states espousing nationalist modernization consciously deploy national educational systems as central to broad projects of political socialization. Here, as officials, teachers, or pedagogical scholars, those affiliated with national education become conceptualizers, interpreters, and implementers of particular national visions. Academic theorists of nationalism have thus rightfully labeled these individuals “nationalist educator intellectuals,” capturing the pedagogical corps’ self-perception and the special, often understudied contribution educators make to the formation of nationalist ideologies. Indeed, interpreting the purview of education quite broadly, educators have seen it as their duty to think and write programmatically on the whole gamut of issues affecting their environments.