“Bread, Freedom, and Dignity!” This chant reverberated through the streets of Egypt in January 2011. The Egyptian people came together, across socioeconomic differences, and religious and gender divides to imagine a more prosperous future for their country. The Community School seeks to recreate the diverse, unified and powerful “Egypt” that was created in Tahrir Square all those years ago. I was only eleven years old during the Arab Spring. Through the TV, I watched the seeds of hope transform my country. I watched as our once insurmountable differences melted away as hope bloomed. This imagined community that emerged in Tahrir Square gave me a glimpse of what could be. The power that emanated from the streets is a testament to what can happen when people of all socioeconomic classes and religions come together. It inspired me to design for diversity.

The Community School will be Egypt’s first socioeconomically integrated, bilingual school. I am designing this school with a community of teachers, students and parents. We are currently in the design and ideation phase. We are aiming to build a community, across socioeconomic differences, that is driven by academic excellence, community consciousness and critical reasoning. We are a school, a community and a family. Ours is an aspirational community, one that models what Egypt could and should be. Our school aspires to create a nurturing and challenging environment that enables our students to develop a deep sense of community consciousness that is rooted in empathy and critical thinking. Rather than being a school that prepares students for democracy, this is a school that democratizes education and focuses on democratic principles such as power from the people, justice and autonomy. The school intends to meet the need for a socioeconomically integrated, high-quality community school that reflects the people’s desire for greater power, choice and self-determination.

This need became evident to me after I conducted a series of interviews with parents, students, teachers and community members. I started this process on my own in Boston, geographically isolated from my community in Cairo. I realized that without constant input from my community, my school design would be disconnected from reality. These interviews were, and continue to be, a critical part of the design process. My co-conspirators, as I have come to call them, provide me with insightful questions, pushback and support. The Community School has yet to be built. The hope is that it will be built within the decade. I invite your participation throughout this process.

As of Now, What Does Schooling in Egypt Look Like?

High-quality education today is concentrated in private, international schools that serve children from Egypt’s most affluent families. Disciplinary standards at these schools lean on Western ideas of compliance and uniformity. There is little to no understanding of the vibrant local culture and how it is displayed in the classroom.

What Would Democratized Schooling Look Like in Egypt?

Mostafa and Haitham are both sixteen-year-old boys growing up in the same city, Cairo, but exist in realms that are worlds apart. Mostafa comes from a family that enjoys generational wealth. He lives in a large house in the fifth settlementFootnote 1 and has never had to worry about money. Haitham, on the other hand, comes from a low socioeconomic status family. Haitham’s father is a construction worker who receives a daily wage as opposed to a predictable salary. His father is responsible for feeding Haitham and his four siblings as his mother is unable to work. Haitham knows that his father worries about how he will be able to afford their next meal. Haitham takes a microbus to school while Mostafa’s driver takes him and his younger sister to school. This split reality is a product of the immense income inequality in Egypt. Education in Egypt has been swept up in the neoliberal education movement. This can be seen with the growing demand for private tutors and private schools. Private tutoring has become an integral part of the Egyptian educational landscape, even in the poorest villages. The neoliberal conception of schooling, paired with the rising number of private schools in Egypt, exacerbates these vastly different experiences. Within the current system, Mostafa’s and Haitham’s paths would never have crossed. At our school, Mostafa and Haitham collaborate, will engage in meaningful dialogue and create a flourishing friendship that transcends socioeconomic divides. They will have open and honest conversations about class divides that are rooted in curiosity and empathy. These conversations will be difficult—unearthing generations’ worth of resentment, anger and elitism. The purpose of our school is to help our students navigate these conversations and leave with a new perspective on the broader community. Our school expands their circle of concern, challenges them to become morally driven, community-oriented individuals and instills in them a desire to serve others.

Our disciplinary standards move away from compliance and uniformity toward standards that are rooted in an understanding of the local culture. Our hope for democratized schooling in Egypt is that it would be socioeconomically integrated, anti-colonial and community-oriented. Not only do Egyptians want and deserve an education that fulfills their need for “bread, freedom and human dignity”, but they also deserve progressive, anti-colonial schooling that is rooted in the local culture. Our school intends to provide quality outside of these historical colonial spaces and actively challenge the remnants of colonialism in our mentalities and in our society. In terms of academics, anti-colonial education centers on local knowledge and scholarly practices as well as deep questioning of colonial ideas. The Community School will lean on local experts and engage with and challenge local knowledge-creation practices such as storytelling. With regard to school culture, our vision for anti-colonial education does not just look like the absence of colonial ideas and practices, but a consistent focus on empowering the local culture. It also means that our students are able to fully embrace every aspect of the loud, argumentative, overwhelmingly friendly culture that resides within them.

With regard to academics, our school stands in direct contrast to the rigid, test-based public education that is available to most Egyptians. Public education is strictly tied to year-end examinations that determine whether students can progress to the following grade and, most significantly, what degrees they can pursue at the higher education level. These examinations require students to memorize and regurgitate content. Students are not required to synthesize, analyze or examine content or ideas. Engaging and collaborative pedagogies are reserved for students from affluent families who can afford to send them to private schools. Our school provides quality education that is open to families from all socioeconomic backgrounds.

Habits of Mind

The academic focuses of the Community School are summed up in our habits of mind: collaboration, reflection, social courage and community embeddedness.

The first habit of mind is collaboration. Collaboration is a core tenet of democracy and thus central to our model of democratized schooling. In theory, each constituent in a democracy has equal power over the outcome of elections. However, only when constituents organize their individual power toward a collaborative effort does change happen. At our school, collaboration will be seen at all levels—in classrooms, between teaching teams and administrative staff. Students will focus mainly on group discussions and group-based inquiry lessons. They will be encouraged to collaborate both inside and outside the classroom in a variety of different settings. Schedules will be set up so that grade-level teaching teams have ample time to come together, share best practices and plan for the best learning outcomes.

Reflection is critical for accountability, another democratic principle that inspires our academics and whole-school culture. Reflective practices will be used to deal with disciplinary issues at all grade levels. Students will think critically about their choices and actions and be held accountable for their behavior. Academic deans will lead structured professional development sessions that allow teachers to reflect on what has been going well and what they can improve. As a wider community, we will come together for reflective town halls every semester, to see how far we have come and where we still need to go.

Social courage is a habit of mind that several parents brought to my attention during the interview portion of my design process. Social courage, or شجاعة الأدبية, is the confidence to stand up for what is right, act upon our principles and speak up when it seems impossible to do so. The parents I spoke to during the design process stressed that our communities need morally grounded, courageous citizens and that schools were partly responsible for a child’s moral development.

Community embeddedness is a habit of mind but also a way that the Community School actively tries to decolonize schooling. Focusing our academic and extracurricular endeavors on what is important to the community and the issues it is facing in the present moment allows our students to develop a nuanced, productive and empathetic understanding of their community. The Community School hopes to embed a sense of community consciousness in each of our students. This will be done through service learning that is directly linked to academic content. Community service is a cornerstone of the Community School experience. Community service helps students develop moral awareness and a social justice identity. Our academic programs fulfill our students’ need for self-determination and power. Students can choose between a wide variety of courses that fulfill their graduation requirements. They also have the opportunity to choose how they wish to be assessed. Together, the four habits of mind come together to show what we expect of our students.

What Challenges Exist on the Path to Achieving Democratized Schooling in Egypt?

There are many challenges to achieving democratic schooling in Egypt. My interviews with students, parents, educators and community members in Egypt have illuminated how deeply entrenched classism is in Egyptian society. Affluent parents were apprehensive about the idea of a socioeconomically integrated school for two main reasons. The first reason is that a core function of school for many families is to introduce their children “to the right people”. For affluent families, “the right people” are those with economic and social power and privilege. The second reason is that affluent families believe that their values are distinct from the values of less-affluent families. One parent explained that she would be opposed to a socioeconomically integrated school because she wants her children to be raised with the right morals and principles. This classist, deficit-based view of socioeconomically disadvantaged families is all too common and points to the urgent need for socioeconomic integration. However, many affluent and non-affluent families were enthusiastic about the idea of a socioeconomically integrated school and saw it as an opportunity to raise moral citizens. Using schooling to unite students across socioeconomic differences creates socially conscious, empathetic citizens that can help usher in Egypt’s prosperous future.

Another challenge is the constraints of the political climate. The school functions within and embraces the constraints of the political climate. We are not advocating for the democratization of society, but for the democratization of schooling for the betterment of society. The democratized schooling that the Community School is modeling centers on increased access, autonomy and empowering students to be ethical leaders in their communities. Democratic communities and schools must reach an understanding of what the “common good” is. My co-conspirators and I have come up with the following working definition of the common good in our context: The Community School believes that “the common good” is achieved when we are all supported as well as challenged. The common good is achieved when students and teachers alike are able to grow through questioning and critical thinking. Most importantly, the common good is achieved when our community serves each individual regardless of socioeconomic status.

What Needs to Happen for This Dream to Become a Reality?

Creating a socioeconomically integrated school in Egypt requires designing for those least likely to be designed for. The biggest element of designing for the least likely to be designed for is family support. Flexible scheduling, meals for both students and families, transportation to many areas of Greater Cairo, and night-school classes for parents are just a few of the administrative features of the Community School that will allow us to fully support our families. Low-income households in Egypt are typically single-income households with more than four or five children. These families suffer from severe food insecurity, health issues due to improper sanitation and illiteracy among many other social and economic problems. The Community School will support parents as much as they will the students. Our approach aims to be an all-encompassing, compassionate approach to families and students. This approach, however, requires a significant and consistent supply of capital.

The design and planning processes require an intimate understanding of how financial and social capital can influence power dynamics at socioeconomically integrated schools. Real democracies have never had fully equal citizens. In order to democratize schooling, we must be aware of this reality and actively design to mitigate the effects of inequities in our community. Democratized schools are not utopias, but communities that actively strive to increase access and ensure equity.

Socioeconomic integration also requires a unique funding model. The Community School will have a sliding-scale tuition model but will rely heavily on external fundraising. A heavy reliance on fundraising ensures that our affluent families do not feel a sense of power over school decisions due to their larger financial contribution to the school. This model is the first of its kind in Egypt. This has not been previously attempted because there are no governmental funds or grants to draw on and the model must rely solely on external fundraising or private grants. This model is risky as it depends on the willingness and generosity of private individuals and companies as well as the ability of the school to attract higher-income families. However, stakeholders that we have talked to seem eager to contribute to a new model of schooling.

Conclusion

The Community School hopes to raise a generation that can continue growing our beautiful country. We will provide them with critical reasoning, collaboration and community-oriented tools that help them honor Egypt’s history while bringing it into a new era. As we continue to collaborate with stakeholders, design and idea, we welcome your active participation in our school.