From the independence generation to the Bouazizi generation : Tunisian education under the spotlight

Abstract

Though I was formally born some two and a half months after Tunisia’s independence on March 20, 1956, I, like many Tunisians, can claim I was ‘bornagain’ on January 14, 2011, when Tunisia’s President was overthrown. Had I been an Egyptian Arab national, I would have declared, as Friedman (2011) suggests, that I was born on January 25, 2011, A.E., meaning ‘After Egypt’. I say ‘formally born’ to indicate that back in those days, birth registrations often took place days, weeks and possibly months after the actual birth itself. This depended on when the birth reporter, often the father or a family member, saw the local Sheikh (the mayor) who would register the birth. Sometimes, registration of one child did not take place until a second child was born, in which case they would be registered as twins. Because of rampant illiteracy, popular memory in those days seldom referred to events by a specific date; instead, local history registered major events such as the ‘Year of the Measles’, ‘Year of the Revolution’, ‘Year of the Rice’, ‘Year of the Canary Seeds’, ‘Year of the Saw Dust’, ‘Year of the Yellow Storms’ and so on. These were the socio-historical circumstances of my birth. Geographically, I was born in a country area in the middle of nowhere, now part of the Governorate of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. Relatively speaking, I was luckier than many other children of the area because my extended family, particularly my uncle Ahmed Sassi, was instrumental in literally building the very school where we studied; while my brothers and cousins had to walk only two kilometres of dirt road to reach the school, many other students had to walk eight or nine kilometres every morning to attend class. It is no exaggeration to say that this school changed the human landscape of our area and aligned it some with history and life, including for those children who walked miles and miles from the early, pitch-dark morning hours. In 1974, I participated in the United Nations Women’s Year Contest that was organized by my secondary school in Gafsa and was awarded the third prize, school-wide. Two years later, I passed the baccalaureate exam, landed a scholarship in the École Normale Superieure of Tunis, and graduated in 1981 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English language, literature and civilization. Meantime, my training as an English teacher required spending a year of linguistic internship in Birmingham, UK, as a French language assistant. I could have travelled the world of ideas as a student of history, sociology, or philosophy, but I knew that studying English was the real ticket across the world of linguistic and cultural boundaries, and beyond the realities of life in the village and the national capital. Three years after graduation, I was working on a post-graduate degree under the supervision of Professor Richard Payne in Tunis, and he suggested I should talk to his wife Patricia, then Director of Amideast, Tunisia, in view of pursuing my studies in the USA. Thus, I went, from the dales and vales of Sidi Bouzid to become the proverbial ‘Bedouin in the capital’, and then, on to the West Midlands, and into Indiana University of Bloomington, as a Fulbright Scholar, working on an MA, and then a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics, which I gained in 1988. Circumstances took me to teach at tertiary institutions in the Easternmost tip of the Arab world, in Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, then back to Tunisia as deputy dean, and now, back to the USA as an associate professor of Arabic with the University of Wyoming. Teaching is teaching, whatever you teach, wherever you may be. Teaching is touching heart and mind; it is technique, technology, theory, training, planning, and passion. When I was completing my Ph.D. dissertation, I told my supervisor, Professor Charles S. Bird, how I was longing to go back Home, because there were many issues to address and wrongs to redress, but his insightful comment I still remember to this day, ‘Ali’, said he, ‘the cause of education is the same everywhere.’ In Tunisia, the road to concretizing ideals is bumpy and tortuous. The State is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. When you take a position at any level, it must mean you have gone through all security filters, and you are okay; you recognize the limits and you know better than rocking the boat. If the system needs your opinion, it will give it to you. Your ideas and writings are tolerated as long as they are strictly within the confines of your field of expertise and should not smack of any criticism of the status quo. Depart from the script, at your and your family’s risk and peril. You wish to give your students a voice, which, you, yourself, lack. Or, is it ‘lacked’, a verb in the past tense, a verb in the dead tense, for today’s circumstances have changed beyond recognition, or so one would hope.