Analysts link Arab winds of change to school texts

By Anita Poehlig Mar 26, 2011, 12:47 GMT

Braunschweig, Germany - The winds of change sweeping the Arab world have got as much to do with school textbooks as with Facebook and Twitter, two Germany-based analysts say.

Tunisian philosophy teacher Sarhan Dhouib and German sociologist Susanne Kroehnert-Othman have been studying what appears in Arabic textbooks. The books give children a positive attitude to human rights which the political reality in their nations does not match.

The academics spoke as the popular uprisings, which have already swept away authoritarian rulers in Egypt and Tunisia, were continuing.

'Many nations in the Middle East and North Africa see themselves as modern and international and do include topics related to human rights in their school textbooks,' Kroehnert-Othman said in her office in Braunschweig.

She works for the Georg Eckert Institute, a think tank that studies school textbooks round the world.

She and Dhouib combed through Arabic-language textbooks to assess how they have changed in recent decades and taken up such human- rights issues as political liberty or the rights of the individual.

'One reads a great many ideals in the books, though the reality on the ground is quite different,' said Kroehnert-Othman.

Schools in Tunisia did encourage pupils to think about democracy. The dictatorship that was toppled in the protests may have under- estimated the far-reaching effects of education on ordinary Tunisians.

Dhouib, who was formerly a schoolteacher in Tunisia, said, 'The curriculum there covers both Arab philosophers and western ones like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.'

Children in Tunisia had already been conscious that neither their parents nor their imams were very well informed about rights, said Dhouib, who is now on the philosophy department staff at Germany's University of Kassel.

'The hopes that such classroom texts arouse were getting less and less likely to come true,' explained Kroehnert-Othman.

'As long as people who have an education have a chance to get a job, repressive states can function, despite this disconnect.

'That's because the states themselves are the principal employer,' she said.

But when a gap springs up between people's expectations and reality, educated people lose patience with empty promises of freedoms and political participation, she explained. 'That's when they go out and join a mass protest.'

Read more about Education

Read more about Mideast Conflict

Read more about Science