on teaching in Egypt

A few people have asked me what teaching is like in Egypt. I don’t remember if I’ve answered that question in a post before, but since I was thinking about the subject again today, here are some of the main differences between teaching in Cairo, Chicago, and Amsterdam (the three places where I’ve taught).

*in Egypt the students are actually a couple of years younger on average, and that has many effects. It is extremely common here to bail out on high school one or two years early and go straight to university (though a new Egyptian law next fall will raise the minimum from age 16 and 2 years of high school to age 17 and 3 years of high school: a good new law, in my opinion). The upside of the 16-year-old students is a greater receptiveness, and the downside is that sometimes there can be rather immature discipline problems. They’re 16, after all.

*in all three places I taught in English. The spoken English of the students is at a very high level in both Amsterdam and Cairo, though the written English may not be quite as grammatically perfect as with native speakers (and in many cases it is, just not all cases).

*The following contrast between Cairo and Amsterdam is very interesting. In Amsterdam I was always addressed on a first-name basis; in Cairo I am always addressed as “Doctor” even when I meet students from my first year who may now be 31 years old and married with kids. And here’s the strange part… From that fact you would think that the relations with the Egyptian students are more formal, but the opposite is the case. Egyptians tend to be a very outgoing people, rarely shy, and your students will just walk right up and talk to you in pretty much any situation. (That contradicts what the faculty brochure said before I came, which is that some of the more conservative girls might avoid their male professors if running into them in public, and that we shouldn’t take it personally. I’ve never remotely encountered such an issue. Even my most conservative female students will always stop and talk to me on Cairo streets, even if we get angry looks from pedestrians who think I’m a wicked tourist trying to seduce the virtuous natives.) By contrast the Dutch students, despite addressing me by first name, were at first quite shy about speaking with me during on-street random encounters. At least that was the case until I told them about the difference! And then the Dutch students decided it was OK to start inviting me for coffee and things like that, and I had an amazingly good time with them.

*A fairly typical philosophy topic in all western countries would be atheism and matters related thereto; even the most religious students in the West are going to expect to be surrounded by skeptics and doubters. They are not entirely unknown here, but it’s not an issue I would touch in this environment. More concretely, I wouldn’t use Nietzsche in an introductory class in Egypt, though a few of my colleagues do. The upper-level students are already a couple of years older, and are there by choice, so I might try different things at that level compared with the Intro courses.

*There isn’t quite as much cultural awareness here about the problem with plagiarism. Not only do we have a bit more of it here, it is often done quite innocently (a few times I’ve heard a rather disarming: “but I agree with the encyclopedia article!” as a reason for having copied it verbatim; so, you have to warn and warn and warn again about drastic punishments well in advance). By contrast, the Dutch students are the least plagiarizing group I have ever encountered, much less than American students. I asked some of the Amsterdam students about why more of them don’t plagiarize, and the response was generally a confused shrug, along with remarks such as: “It takes more work to plagiarize than just to write the paper.”

*Philosophy is an ultra-cool major in the Netherlands, with around 140 freshman philosophy students at the University of Amsterdam when I was there. They throw a gigantic all-night party every year, mixing live music with philosophy lectures in an old squat. In Egypt, educational pressures in families are more toward business and engineering, so the small number of Philosophy majors tend to be either highly independent types or else students from unusually Westernized families.

*A large proportion of our students in Cairo are wealthier than the Egyptian average (we’re on an American tuition scale, and that’s out of reach for many here), so I’m also not getting a completely random cross-section of students. I can’t be entirely sure how students at Cairo University or Ain Shams or Helwan or Alexandria might differ from American University students. And one experience I had early on in Egypt was telling the story of how I used to earn money by corn detasseling in the summer. The students looked at me like I had three heads. It took me awhile to realize: manual labor here is done by a specific social class, not by everyone as an impressive rite of passage and sign of authenticity. In an Egyptian context, I was marking myself as a sort of freak by admitting to having done farm labor. There is hardly a chance that any student I have ever taught in 9 years here has done agricultural field labor. Those workers would never get close to a university in a system structured like this one. They might not even be wearing a shirt and pants; there’s a huge city/country distinction here.

*Egyptian students will take things seriously that aren’t always taken seriously in classrooms in the West. For instance, I always sense a certain critical distance among American students when considering something like Socrates’s arguments for the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo. American students have a sort of automatic historico-critical approach: “that’s what the Greeks believed in that time,” etc. Here, it is refreshing to see Egyptian students actually grappling with the various proofs and either accepting or dismissing them rather than historicizing them.

Those are the differences I can think of at the moment. There may be many others.