Learning Before Schools: Education, Memory, and Distributed Knowledge Ecologies in Pre-Oil Arabia.
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| Title: | Learning Before Schools: Education, Memory, and Distributed Knowledge Ecologies in Pre-Oil Arabia. |
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| Authors: | Aldossari, Mubarak M.1 maldossari@ut.edu.sa |
| Source: | International Journal of Special Education. 2026 Special Issue, Vol. 41, p718-724. 7p. |
| Subject Terms: | *Memorization, *Islamic education, *Nonformal education, *Teaching methods, *History of education |
| Geographic Terms: | Saudi Arabia |
| Abstract: | In this work, modernization narratives that depict pre-oil Arabia as being educationally marginal prior to the establishment of centralized schooling (during the 20th Century) will be challenged. The article will return specifically to Najd and the Hijaz to argue that during the 18th-20th centuries, there were pedagogical ecologies that developed across Arabia in dispersed settings, such as households, mosques, manuscripts, kuttāb schools, pilgrimage routes, apprenticeships, trade networks and oral performances. The shift in this work is from a bounded institutional approach to education to a distributed social ecology of education that combines mobility, memory, manuscript culture, religious authority, and everyday practices. To understand this, the study draws on Arabic chronicles, travel accounts, memoirs, biographical literature and scholarship on Islamic pedagogy and literacy which posits this relationality between oral and textual practice rather than a sequentially. Overlapping pedagogies emerged with the processes of recitation, memorization, commentating, copying and teacher-student relations, which resulted in the authoritative nature of knowledge. Furthermore, it will be contended that educational modernity accomplished more than just the spread of education in Arabia. Instead, it reimagined what has traditionally been understood as education. Processes such as memorization, oral genealogy, apprenticeship, domestic pedagogy, and poetic transmission became more and more marginalized within historiographies that were developed on bureaucratic schooling and institutional archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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| Database: | Education Research Complete |
| Abstract: | In this work, modernization narratives that depict pre-oil Arabia as being educationally marginal prior to the establishment of centralized schooling (during the 20th Century) will be challenged. The article will return specifically to Najd and the Hijaz to argue that during the 18th-20th centuries, there were pedagogical ecologies that developed across Arabia in dispersed settings, such as households, mosques, manuscripts, kuttāb schools, pilgrimage routes, apprenticeships, trade networks and oral performances. The shift in this work is from a bounded institutional approach to education to a distributed social ecology of education that combines mobility, memory, manuscript culture, religious authority, and everyday practices. To understand this, the study draws on Arabic chronicles, travel accounts, memoirs, biographical literature and scholarship on Islamic pedagogy and literacy which posits this relationality between oral and textual practice rather than a sequentially. Overlapping pedagogies emerged with the processes of recitation, memorization, commentating, copying and teacher-student relations, which resulted in the authoritative nature of knowledge. Furthermore, it will be contended that educational modernity accomplished more than just the spread of education in Arabia. Instead, it reimagined what has traditionally been understood as education. Processes such as memorization, oral genealogy, apprenticeship, domestic pedagogy, and poetic transmission became more and more marginalized within historiographies that were developed on bureaucratic schooling and institutional archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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| ISSN: | 08273383 |
