Copyright

Linda Herrera

Published On

2025-11-17

Page Range

pp. 187–204

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

11. A Life in Education from Academia to the World Bank

Interview with Juan Manuel Moreno

  • Linda Herrera (author)
Chapter of: Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt(pp. 187–204)
Juan Manuel Moreno served as the Lead Education Specialist in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region for the World Bank during the initial years of the Education 2.0 reforms. He reflects on his life in international education and ponders Egypt’s particularly securitized approach to its schools and the resilience of the Thanaweya Amma exam. He addresses misconceptions about the Bank and explains how it negotiates sectoral strategies with each country. He cautions that even with advances of digital transformation, nothing can replace the face-to-face school, classroom, and teacher, and stresses the value of research and data to diagnose problems and form an inclusive vision of education which is needed for a country’s future survival.

Contributors

Linda Herrera

(author)
Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the Global Studies in Education program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Linda Herrera is Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the Global Studies in Education program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was director of the Education 2.0 Research and Documentation Project in Egypt and served as an international education advisor. A social anthropologist with expertise in the Middle East and North Africa, her research and teaching cover a range of areas including education and power, youth studies, citizenship education and critical democracy, technology and society, and international education development. Her books include, Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles (American University in Cairo Press, 2022), Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century (with A. Bayat, University of California Press, 2021), Revolution in the Age of Social Media (Verso, 2014), Wired Citizenship: Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East (Routledge, 2014), Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (with A. Bayat, Oxford University Press, 2010), and Cultures of Arab Schooling: Critical Ethnographies from Egypt (with C. A. Torres, State University of New York Press, 2006).