The pervasive informal privatization of public institutions seen in urban secondary schooling is a key component of the lived citizenship of different social strata. Many of the arguments in the book depend on an appreciation of the implications of pervasive private tutoring for the everyday school and for articulations of citizenship and national belonging among students. Privatization-by-tutoring affects almost every aspect of school life in Egypt, from whether students and teachers come to school or enter classrooms to whether the morning assembly ritual is performed. It is, however, the different ways in which informal tutoring markets are established within and alongside formal institutions in the three types of school that reflect the functioning of state institutions and differentiated modes of lived and imagined citizenship. The chapter dissects the trajectories, functioning and implications of informal privatization in different tiers of schooling. It explains enrollment in tutoring, its costs, the related forms of coercion, cheating, truancy, narratives of conscientious teachers and tropes of neoliberal subjectivity.

The book starts with the description of a violent scene inside a classroom, and this chapter elaborates on patterns of beating and humiliation that many readers will find disturbing. This chapter tackles violent punishment by school authorities in Egypt in its historical, social, cultural, classed and gendered dimensions. It describes the ways in which teachers explain and situate their practices and unpacks how violent punishment might be related to a “culture” of the poor or their structural conditions and how constructions of masculinity and femininity intersect with gendered punishment and surveillance. The chapter underlines how punishment is changing in its forms and intensities, and the complex ways in which it is both accepted and contested by students and families. Through the example of a “demonstration in support of beating” in 2011, it explores the distinctions between repressive, exploitative and disciplinary punishment implicit in the discourses of students and families.