Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East (by Hilary Falb Kalisman)

Abstract

Hilary Falb Kalisman’s book is an excellent history of the relationship between education and shifting ideas of the state in the modern Middle East. Kalisman focuses especially on the transnational nature of a special class of educators as they move from a system where they are in high demand and therefore have negotiating power with and access to the state to a national system in which they are faced with an inaccessible bureaucracy intent on standardizing their profession to align it with new ideas of national will. The discourse on nationalism and education in the Middle East is incredibly complex and turbulent with numerous interpretive models and analytical approaches.