https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/34405 2026-04-23T22:40:54Z 2026-04-23T22:40:54Z Boum, Aomar https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/34583 2018-10-12T01:30:50Z 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The culture of despair : youth, unemployment and educational failures in North Africa Authors: Boum, Aomar Abstract: I was born in south-eastern Morocco in an oasis at the foot of the Anti-Atlas Mountains. My parents are illiterate and my oldest brother was one of the first villagers to attend a secular public school not only in my extended family but also in the whole province of Tata. My father is from a low social group locally known as the Haratine. Unlike the maraboutic families (shorfa), the Haratine do not claim descent from the Prophet Mohammed’s family lineage. Their inferior status limits their social mobility and economic improvement. Until Independence, the Haratine were farmers working as day-labourers mainly in lands owned by the shorfa. A few owned property, which made them largely servants in the traditional subsistence oases agriculture. After Independence, the Haratine and their descendents began to challenge not only the inherited religious status and authority of the shorfa but also their economic position by sending their children to modern schools. By attending these new schools my brother was able to break away from the social hierarchies imposed over the years on my father and other Haratine. As a teacher with an independent income, he was able to sever any future ties of dependency on the political and economic system based on the charismatic authority of the shorfa. Education was not a priority in a context where people struggled to fulfil basic economic needs. Many families made hard decisions to send one child to school while committing others to contribute to the daily farming activities. Others were content with giving their children basic Qur’anic schooling. Qur’anic education was an important stage of child education. Children were sent at an early age to the msid (Qur’anic school) to ensure that they could read and write and respect their elders and the traditional moral strictures of society. Education was closely linked to the local mosque and local imams (religious leaders) supported by the community tutored children. Successful children who were good at rote memorization and who were able to learn the Qur’an by heart could pursue their education to become imams or judges. Until recently, girls were never included in families’ educational plans. I came of age at a time when the post-independence government made drastic changes resulting in universal primary and secondary education in urban and rural areas. I benefited from these educational legislative changes and was able to get my high school diploma without dropping out like many have done. Twenty years ago, my eldest brother, then a high school teacher, strongly advised me to pursue an undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature at Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakesh, Morocco. I did it with hesitation. I thought at the time that my chance of a secure and guaranteed government job was stronger if I continued my education in geography and sought employment as a secondary teacher in the educational public system. Today, as I reflect on the social and economic situation in Morocco, I strongly believe that my brother’s paternalistic orientation proved to be central in my educational trajectory to my present position as an assistant professor of Near Eastern and Religious Studies at the University of Arizona. By the end of the 1980s my brother knew that the Moroccan government could not sustain the employment of a bulging wave of graduates at the rate it did in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore he advised, if not coerced, me to learn a foreign language that would prepare me at least to get a job in the sector of tourism in case I could not secure one in teaching. His recommendation was key to my educational and professional career. I was able to finish my graduate schooling in humanities and social sciences and went on to earn a degree in anthropology at the University of Arizona becoming one of the few Muslim anthropologists who research and write on ethnic and religious minorities in Middle Eastern and North African societies. My brother’s advice has taught me that getting an education is about learning the skills to promote oneself after graduation. These skills have to fit the market and therefore education is also about making decisions to fit market prospects. In my experience with the educational system throughout North Africa there is a gap and a discrepancy between the educational system, learners’ dreams and the expectation of the market. The challenge of the market and lack of educational guidance are at the root of youth despair today. I was fortunate to escape this trap. However, luck cannot strike at everyone’s door—only a few graduates could make it through the bureaucratic sieve while others were stuck in the net creating a culture of economic despair and socio-political resignation.

2011-01-01T00:00:00Z Mazawi, Andre Elias https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/34560 2018-10-11T01:30:11Z 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Education as spaces of community engagement and a ‘capacity to aspire’ Authors: Mazawi, Andre Elias Abstract: Jaffa, where I was born and where I lived for over four decades before moving to Canada, remains for me a formative experience in engaging what it means to be a Palestinian Arab living in Israel, in a neglected and impoverished neighbourhood, subject to intense ‘Judaizing’ (yihoud, in Hebrew) urban zoning master plan policies, and in which my community and its future are left out. In Jaffa, public institutions—whether municipal or governmental—were distant, belligerent, hostile, exercising power in a discriminatory fashion that left little leveraging for a notion of citizenship to emerge in any meaningful way. This configuration of a contested space and place offered the most immediate and powerful introduction to ongoing aspects of the 1948 nakba experienced by Palestinians with the creation of the State of Israel. In Jaffa, the nakba has not abated, rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding. The generalised neglect and discriminatory discourses and policies against what is often described as ‘non-Jewish’ residents on the part of Tel-Aviv’s municipality epitomises the larger experience of Palestinians in Israel, and their construction as an alien national minority. The latter is left with little space—social, political, economic, and geographic—being thus actively prevented by the state from building a shared public space in which right and law would prevail among all citizens equally. My schooling and, later on, my university education, as formative as they were, present a second front of struggle. I have been educated in a French Catholic school, which runs a fully-fledged French curriculum. The history and geography of my homeland were either totally absent or contained in Israeli-produced textbooks for Hebrew schools. Upon graduation, I found myself much more knowledgeable about the specificities of French history and Zionist narratives than I was when it came to the Palestinian narrative of dispossession and Palestinian and Arab cultural and political life and history. My Tel-Aviv University undergraduate education (French Language and Literature, and Education), as formative as it was, offered little curricular contents that would facilitate a meaningful and critical understanding of those aspects of Palestinian society I was observing and experiencing on a daily basis. I did not have the opportunity to attend a course that would focus on the Arab or Palestinian society, not to speak of Arab education, either that within Israel, the Occupied Territories, or in the Arab region. At Tel-Aviv University, there was no course from among the courses I could chose from that was offered by a Palestinian/ Arab instructor, either during the course of my undergraduate studies or during my graduate and doctoral studies in sociology of education. The university library, and later on, graduate courses in critical sociological and literary theories, coupled with my subsequent engagement with social activists of an older generation who founded the League for the Arabs of Jaffa in 1979, offered me the first capacity to engage the tensions, challenges and contradictions of a world that slowly emerged out of the opacity of my consciousness, and took shape in the form of a more informed, and critical perspectives on the human and political condition context. In no small measure, this shift was triggered—in a cascade shape of sorts that has never really abated since then—by my fortuitous reading of a short piece in Hebrew written by Israeli historian Yigal ‘Ilem as a response to the second chapter of Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine. Published in 1981 in the literary review Siman Kri’a, number 14, Said’s second chapter, entitled ‘Zionism from the standpoint of its victims’ was immediately followed by ‘Ilem’s response, titled ‘Zionism, its Palestinian victim and the Western world’. It was not so much ‘Ilem’s attempt to salvage a Zionist historical narrative in the light of Said’s relentless analysis that drew my curiosity, as it did. It was rather my discovery that there is a Palestinian narrative, and a critical and articulate scholarly one at that, to start with. For me, I should admit, Said’s oblique entry into my intellectual life, through ‘Ilem’s Hebrew response, was one of these powerfully formative storm-like moments. It reconfigured my approach to and understanding of the question of discourse and its intersections with politics, power, and the representation of the Palestinians in literature and history. That Said’s The Question of Palestine was first published in English in 1979 and that I read it in its 1981 Hebrew translation, is indicative of the multifaceted flows of culture, identity, and politics. Yet, it is also indicative of the powerful ways in which intellectual encounters and ideas travel and engage consciousness and thought in very unpredictable—yet so formative—ways. Reflecting on these lived experiences, I am now in a position to name the power of schooling and higher education as a potent social instrument, as a carrier of political agendas and forms of consciousness that cannot be left un-problematised; nor can they be left un-questioned in terms of their relations with broader political configurations of power that shape biographies, classroom practices, as much as they seal the status of ethno-cultural groups, ultimately. The intersection between education and hegemony—as I would later on discover that concept in the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Michael Apple—sheds light on many personal moments and experiences that would otherwise have remained opaque. In hindsight, I realise the multifaceted role of state institutions, their exclusionary policies, as well as the broader contexts of power they mediate. In hindsight, too, I realise the necessity of being intellectually vigilant—as an educator, a researcher, and a citizen—in terms of reflecting how, within my contexts of action, I mediate power and contribute to the consolidation of hegemony, despite intentions to the contrary. In hindsight, still, I can claim to un-cover the rather fragmented and fragmentary nature of citizenship in deeply divided societies, its fragility and precariousness as a civic project, and its idealised invocation in textbooks and the media compared with the more subtle legal and political exclusionary practices that underpin its actual enactment. Here, the work of Chantal Mouffe has come to inform my thinking on the wider challenges involved in articulating a viable, inclusive, and vibrant public sphere in relation to which citizenship could be contemplated as a viable political project. Over time, these concerns have come to gradually occupy the centre front of my thinking about education, schooling, citizenship, culture, and politics; shaping my understanding of the tremendous impact the political has on the articulations of the educational. By virtue of my French education, from an early stage I was powerfully exposed to the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault (through Edward Said’s work), and many others. Bourdieu’s work remains for me a reference point in terms of the conceptual arsenal it provides to understand the dynamics of the field of education in relation to the larger field of power. His early work, and particularly Esquisses Algériennes, offers important insights into those aspects of social, cultural, and political struggles that perhaps are less visible in his later work.

2011-01-01T00:00:00Z Ferrarotti, Franco https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/34559 2018-10-11T01:30:26Z 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The educated person and the new capitalism : a Euro-Mediterranean reflection Authors: Ferrarotti, Franco Abstract: I had at least four different careers: translator and editorial consultant, as a young man (with Publisher Einaudi, Turin), 1944–1946; business associate (with Adriano Olivetti, 1948–1960); as an international diplomat (at the OECE, in Paris, responsible of the Facteurs Sociaux and Head of the Human Sciences Section; 1957–1962); as a Member of the Italian Parliament (1958–1963). But finally, my only real career—some sort of underground current unifying my whole life experience—has been the career of university professor at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, having, by a stroke of good luck, reinvented, as it were, a discipline that had been eliminated from any academic curriculum by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile during fascism (the same thing happened in Germany during Nazism), that is sociology. As a Member of Parliament I was obviously independent, belonging to the Gruppo Misto, to the left of the Christian Democrats. My main target consisted essentially in changing the prevailing, political and intellectual attitude of the Italian élite, traditionally prone to adopt an old-fashioned rhetorical posture in dealing and trying to tackle specific issues and to dissolve ethical problems into aesthetic, if hot theatrical, gestures. Why sociology, one might ask? To put it bluntly: because it was no longer there (psychologically speaking, a clear consequence of my Ulysses’ complex). Secondly, and more seriously, because I was in the best condition to make the rediscovery of sociology. In fact, after the five years of elementary schools, (6 to 11 years of age), I was basically a self-taught student. At 15 I achieved my licenza ginnasiale as a privatista, or private scholar, and two years later my maturità classica; then, at the university of Turin I took my laurea in the department of History and Philosophy with a dissertation on the sociology of Thorstein Veblen, although no courses in social science were offered; later, in 1951 at Chicago University, where Veblen had studied and taught, half a century before. During my formative years, I was blessed by my relative solitude. Being a private student and scholar, I was neither infected by the prevailing neo-idealistic philosophical climate nor by the spiritualistic (Catholic or neo-Thomistic) outlook. Without being fully conscious of it, I was ready for sociology, that is something less abstract than the ongoing philosophy and not so dry as political economy. In 1960, when the first full Chair in Sociology was established in the Italian academic system, I was the ‘natural’ winner. As regards what so far appears to have been the most fateful decision in my life, I recall when, in 1963, I decided, against the advice of many good friends, to abandon active politics. A most difficult, anguishing decision—but I could already see the growing wave of political corruption, the fact that a policymaker must decide before having in his/her hand the reasons justifying the rationality of the decision. Moreover, the fact that in the university milieu a new social type was emerging: the ‘academic gangster’, turning the professor into a shady business dealer. Thus, I did not stand for re-election and devoted myself completely, without reservations, to teaching and research. No doubt that I am a man of books, afflicted by the strange disease of ‘bookishness’. My father hated books because he feared, with some good reasons, that I would become a ‘man of paper’, that is what the Germans would call, perhaps more appropriately a Luft-mensch (a man of air). I have written many books (too many?), but I have read a great deal of books also. Leaving aside the great books of the classical sociological tradition (including, together with the official founders Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, and the epigone Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, there are some books that had an impact on my early education. I would give, in this connection, a passing mention to Charles Péguy, La Thèse; Léon Bloy, La Femme Pauvre, L’Âme de Napoléon , Sueur de Sang; Max Weber, all his works, but especially his last two lectures, ‘Politics as a vocation’, ‘Science as a vocation’; I would mention also the works of Max Scheler and especially of Julius Langbehn, Der Geist des Ganzen. As far as my own books are concerned, I would emphasize the underlying interest for power, power-makers, power-holders, and power victims. This is already apparent in my early Il Dilemma dei Sindacati Americani (1954) and La Protesta Operaia (1955). The main thesis is easily summarized: no power without counter-power; no power without formal legitimation; but, at the bottom of any legitimation, there is an act of illegitimate, pure violence. Hence, from power my interest shifts to violence as a sudden interruption of the dialogue, whether interpersonal, inter-institutional and international; violence as a void of values; violence as hypnosis. Most important contributions include: Alle Radici della Violenza (1979); L’Ipnosi della Violenza (1980); Il Potere come Relazione e come Struttura (1980); Rapporto sul Terrorismo (1981). Thus, violence, although at the origin of society, denies in principle the existence of the community. Hence, a dichotomic view of society, with a commanding élite and a subjected majority. This holds true not only in the domestic scene, but also as regards immigration with its inevitable consequences, that is a multicultural, multilinguistic, multireligious, racially discriminating society. In this connection, see my La Tentazione dell’Oblio (1993), dealing with anti-semitism, racism and neo-nazism; but, for the Italian domestic scene, see also Roma da Capitale a Periferia (1970); Vite da Baraccati (1974); La Città come Fenomeno di Classe (1975). From the analysis of racial discrimination, class division and basic social inequality, the issue of rebuilding a sense of community comes to the fore: the public at large feels the need of a new community. How? By finding or by recuperating the value of human relations as having a value in themselves and not in the utilitarian, or market, perspective. But then, what is free from the market logic and its intrinsic utilitarian considerations? The only answer is: the sacred. Hence, my trilogy: Una Teologia per Atei (1983); Il Paradosso del Sacro (1983); Una Fede senza Dogmi (1990), preceded in 1978 by Studi sulla Formazione Sociale del Sacro. With the book, Il Senso del Luogo (2010), I have recently summarized my reservations about globalization. I have especially dwelt on its basic principle, usually neglected even by its most vocal critics, that is: a-territoriality, the indifference to historical variability and to the specific community as a prerequisite for a socially and culturally irresponsible predatory activity all over the world.

2011-01-01T00:00:00Z Novoa, Antonio https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/34558 2018-10-11T01:30:07Z 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Travelling, not arriving : an intellectual journey Authors: Novoa, Antonio Abstract: The most important moment of my life was, without doubt, the Carnation Revolution—the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 that brought an end to a long dictatorship and the colonial war in Africa. I was 19 years old and, for my generation, this is the landmark moment of our lives. As a student, I was deeply involved in the political movements against the regime. My way of thinking and acting is strongly related to this history. In terms of education and culture, Portugal was a very conservative and backward country. Our main commitment was the fight against illiteracy and the promotion of a democratic culture. Freedom is the central dimension of my life. Democratization and social progress are fundamental features in my approach to educational issues. The tradition of the movements of popular education, which was particularly active during the First Portuguese Republic (1910–1926), was very important to build my identity as an educator. The influence of Paulo Freire, namely through his concept of ‘conscientization’, as well as other perspectives on adult education were also very influential. Later, these influences were deepened through my historical research, to which I have devoted much of my academic career. In a sense, as Daniel Hameline, supervisor of my first doctoral thesis, wrote in the preface of the book: the activist met the historian, he became a historian. ‘Professor Nóvoa retains something of the enthusiasm of the activist he was. And remains. The detour to History, and the effort to write it, helped the militant to accentuate his perplexity. Such is a healthy sign for activism, especially in pedagogy, because one becomes better able to resist dogmatism and blindness’. Popular education and history naturally led on to the study of educational innovation and the role played by teachers. In my intellectual trajectory, history is cross-referenced with comparison (comparative studies). Education policies, particularly in Europe, have emerged as an important theme in my work. Outside the University I have always kept a link with groups, movements and associations that promote social rights and the democratization of education and culture. I was the chief adviser for Education of the President of the Republic, Jorge Sampaio, in his first term beginning in 1996 (Jorge Sampaio is currently the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations High Representative). Within the University, I took on several missions, all of which were committed to institutional change. At the beginning of the century, I took office at the highest level, first as Vice-president (2002–2006) and since 2006 as President of the University of Lisbon. Today, critical thinking about the future of higher education, fighting against its commercialization and academic capitalism, the protection of the Arts and Humanities and the defence of education as a public good are a fundamental concern of mine. To sum up, I have looked back at my journey to ally academic life with social and political involvement, with professional intervention among educators and teachers, and institutional action, particularly in my work as President of the University.

2011-01-01T00:00:00Z