Public Education: a Route Into Lebanon's Middle Class in The
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FOCUS 63 level, and had only three rooms. In 1966 the school director, who was from another Public Education: A Route into town, decided to leave and arranged that Saliba replace him, “even though such a Lebanon’s Middle Class in the 1960s position required wasta (“political connec- and Early 1970s tions”),” as he mentioned in an interview. Saliba’s teaching journey is indicative of a wider process that took place in Lebanon during the 1960s. Though the government never became the primary provider of ed- ucation, public schools developed signifi- cantly between the years 1958 and 1970, challenging the hegemony of private sec- tarian institutions over education. Where- Youssef Zbib as these establishments, which were most- ly founded in the nineteenth century, In Lebanon during the 1960s, public educa- Keywords: Lebanon; Education; Middle benefitted mainly middle- and upper-class tion became more accessible to members Class; Bureaucracy Christians, public schools gave people of the lower classes and different sectarian from lower classes and different sects denominations, after a time when educa- Introduction more access to education—something in- tion had been, to a large extent, a privilege In 1962, Melhem Saliba—the son of a com- creasingly seen in the 1960s as a necessary of upper- and middle-class Christians. This munist stonecutter—started teaching at the asset for employment (‘Āmel 25). paper examines the socioeconomic condi- public school in his predominantly Greek tions of public school teachers as a result of Orthodox village of R‘it in mid-Beqaa, I will focus my analysis on one of the impli- this process. Using Bourdieusian analysis, eastern Lebanon. He studied for two years cations of this process—the socioeconom- I argue that these teachers used cultural at the public Dar al-Mu‘allimin al-‘Ulia, or ic conditions of public school teachers— capital acquired through free education to Higher Institute for Teacher Formation, af- mainly because the availability of free become part of a rising professional mid- ter obtaining his brevet diploma, a qualifi- education was a self-feeding process. The dle class. To a large extent, these teachers’ cation given by the government for pass- public school network provided free edu- definition of their own social positions and ing an examination at the ninth grade. The cation to a large number of people from roles was a result of their individual histo- school, which had been built in the 1950s, rural backgrounds and with limited eco- ries and internalized values. offered no classes beyond the elementary nomic means, and then turned a large Middle East – Topics & Arguments #02–2014 FOCUS 64 number of them into new bureaucrats to position thanks to formal education they their objective conditions, were also ac- staff its own apparatus. received in public schools. The education- tively shaped by personal choices and al system gave them an official legitimacy motivations. Their practices took shape By looking strictly at the objective condi- that granted them access into a salaried through a dynamic and reciprocal rela- tions of teachers, such as income, one group of professionals. Such access would tionship among their dispositions and could generally describe them as part of otherwise not have been available. In their preferences they had acquired within a lower-middle class composed of “tech- new social positions, they acquired social their families or at school (habitus), and nocratic, managerial, and technical group- prestige by virtue of their professions and social factors regulating their lives, such ings that do not owe their existence to pri- had better economic means (economic as the official definition of a teacher’s role vate property” (D.L. Johnson, 22). My focus, capital) in comparison to others in the or the wage offered to her by the govern- however, is directed at the process of communities from which they came. ment (field) (Bourdieu and Wacquant 127). these teachers’ socialization. The importance of Bourdieu’s theoretical The testimonies used as empirical data in I argue that, through public formal educa- formulation in this study is that it tran- this paper were gathered from intervie- tion, individuals like Saliba were able to scends the dichotomy between objective wees who come from a rural background, increase their level of education, or what social factors and individual agency. As and became educated through public Bourdieu calls their cultural capital, and we will see in more detail, while going schools roughly from the 1950s to the early improve their social standing (for the through the process of acquiring new so- 1970s. All except one then earned a living terms field, forms of capital, and habitus, I cial positions, individuals often effaced by teaching, mostly in public schools. refer to Bourdieu, Distinction, 97-225). the lines that the government drew in pro- The empirical findings that I have collect- Cultural capital can be substantiated into viding subsidized education and employ- ed do not allow for description of public economic capital—in other words, these ing teachers. school teachers as “an actual class, in the teachers had secure jobs with steady in- sense of a group, a group mobilized for comes thanks to their formal education. Before going any further, a few notes on struggle” (Bourdieu, “The Social Space” But it can also provide “an individual with the methodology I have used are neces- 725). While an organized union movement embodied social attributes that confer sary. My use of Bourdieu’s concepts of did develop during the period under ‘distinction’ upon the individual and legit- class and capital to analyze socio-histor- study, qualitative and quantitative data imacy upon the hierarchy of social in- ical events in Lebanon relies on previ- beyond the scope this paper can include equality and the stratification of taste” ous applications of these concepts on is needed to determine if and how teach- (Moore 446). societies outside of France (Robbins ers were mobilized into such a class, as 2004). Schayegh has also used these described by Bourdieu. The interlocutors, But the social roles and positions ac- concepts to study the rise of Iran’s mid- however, perceived themselves to a large quired by the interlocutors, and arguably dle class in the early twentieth century extent as having acquired a higher social larger numbers of people who shared and its relation to modern medical Middle East – Topics & Arguments #02–2014 FOCUS 65 knowledge (“The Social Relevance of counts to not be “transparent records of bitions of Christian communities to climb Knowledge”). the past” (177). These narratives are not the social ladder (Khater 135). These insti- Interviewees come from Muslim Shi’ite mere descriptive biographies. With the tutions were left to operate freely after and Christian Greek Orthodox families; variation that the medium of recording withdrawal of French troops in 1946 however, they did not mention their sec- here is not personal writing, I understand (Dueck 104-107). tarian affiliation as an element of their these testimonies to be shaped by the in- identity. While I maintain that sects are not terlocutors’ “patterns of world- and self- Laws established during the French man- monolithic sociopolitical groups, and sec- perception or rather by their social habi- date after 1920 gave all religious commu- tarian affiliation cannot be automatically tus” (Schumann 179). Through these nities the freedom to foster their own translated into social position, it is impor- micro-histories, I hope to elucidate how schools. Christians continued to benefit tant to note the following, which is rele- both private and public factors inter- from a traditional network of religious vant to the study of social mobility: Before played to make the social experiences of schools, while Muslims relied on the newly the civil war that erupted in 1975, Shi’ites these individuals an inherent part of the rising government schools (Bashshur, were mostly rural and the last to benefit process of expanding the public educa- “al-Ta‘līm al-‘āli” 43-45), in addition to a from the Lebanese political patronage sys- tion network. limited number of private schools inspired tem. This radicalized the Shi’ite commu- by their Christian counterparts, such as the nity and made it the main tributary for left- But before taking a closer look at these Sunni al-Maqased, founded in 1878 (Schat- ist parties (M. Johnson 6). As for the Greek teachers’ lives, I will put this process into kowski 20), and the Shi’ite ‘Amiliyya, estab- Orthodox community, little attention has economic and political context, as well as lished in 1929 (Atiyyah 149). Public schools, been directed toward its rural component. discuss numbers and facts relevant to it. however, did not develop enough to meet Salibi, for example, stressed that the urban popular need (Traboulsi 94; Dueck 92), mercantile bourgeoisie was mostly Greek Public Education as Part of State which was still the case in the 1950s Orthodox (213). M. Johnson also states Intervention (Mughniyyeh). that being rural is part of the imagined By the time President Fouad Chehab identity that fuels the Maronites’ “romantic came to power in 1958, Lebanon—unlike The expansion of public education in the nationalism,” as pitted against the Sunni’s other postcolonial Arab states—had not 1960s took place within the wider frame- and the Greek Orthodox’s urbanism (185). engaged in eroding the influence of for- work of Presidents Chehab’s (ruled be- eign educational institutions (Roucek 439- tween 1958 and 1964) and Charles Helou’s Narratives were gathered through semi- 44). Most of these had been established (ruled between 1964 and 1970) adoption structured interviews. My use of these oral by French, British, and American Christian of central planning and greater public testimonies is informed by Schumann’s missions in the nineteenth century spending, which amounted to a relative analysis of autobiographies as historical (Bashshur, “al-Ta‘līm al-‘āli” 42-43), and interruption of the laissez-faire approach sources, which understands personal ac- they thrived because they fulfilled the am- (Traboulsi 138).