Copyright

Linda Herrera

Published On

2025-11-17

Page Range

pp. 457–474

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

26. ‘Survival of the Fittest’

A High School Student’s Perspective on Learning, Ethics, and Why Students Cheat

  • Linda Herrera (author)
Chapter of: Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt(pp. 457–474)
This chapter profiles ‘Gamal’, a member of the historic class of 2021. He belongs to the first cohort of students who began high school under an ambitious reform agenda that included the digital transformation of many aspects of learning and assessment, combined with the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Gamal reflects on the unprecedented if somewhat chaotic first years of the national reform. He explains how the figure of the Minister Tareq Shawki, an unconventional and passionate official who always touted his love for science, had a profound influence on him. He recalls the grueling year of isolation during the pandemic, and the highly competitive environment where a ‘survival of the fittest’ environment prevails. At the same time, he explains how students engage in acts of social solidarity through sharing materials and techniques for cheating on assignments and exams in a system they view as arbitrary, degrading, and unfair.

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).