• DOI:10.1080/09620214.2019.1601584
• Corpus ID: 150760167

Decolonizing education, a view from Palestine: an interview with Munir Fasheh

@article{Sukarieh2019DecolonizingEA,
  title={Decolonizing education, a view from Palestine: an interview with Munir Fasheh},
  author={Mayssoun Sukarieh},
  journal={International Studies in Sociology of Education},
  year={2019},
  volume={28},
  pages={186 - 199}
}

• M. Sukarieh
• Published 3 April 2019
• Education
• International Studies in Sociology of Education

The first person who inspired me in relation to learning and moved my imagination in directions that stayed with me until this day was Khalil Sakakini, who in 1896, when he was 18 years old, wrote a small booklet, Wearing Someone Else’s Shoes, in which he reflected on foreign schools in the Jerusalem area, which he felt were robbing children of what they have and replacing that with alien material. Sakakini established a school in 1909 whose motto was ‘dignifying students not degrading them‘ and translated that in practice by ‘no grades, no prizes, no punishment.‘ He was able to do that because the British had not yet occupied Palestine and imposed their educational system. One conviction in his school was ‘knowing Palestine by walking,‘ which was adopted by our principle where we walked every Saturday through villages, hills, and valleys around Ramallah as part of the curriculum. I was lucky my parents sent me to it rather than to an elite foreign school. In addition, Sakakini was rooted in Arab culture and local community. He was immune against illusions such as learning is the result of teaching and that a person’s worth can be measured by a number on a vertical line. The driving force in life today, including education, is the consumption pattern. The heart of the Arab-Islamic civilization (which included various