• 1 Jacob Norris, Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905-1948, Oxford, O (...)

1Agriculture was the key economic sector of Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan/Jordan during the first half of the 20^th century. Locals and colonial administrators touted increasing agricultural productivity as indispensable for Mandate societies. They emphasized education as one of the most important ways of improving agriculture and the status of cultivators overall. British and Jewish narratives of development went a step further, linking the ability to modernize agriculture with the right to rule1.

• 2 Elizabeth Williams, "Contesting the Colonial Narrative's Claims to Progress: A Nationalist's Propo (...)
• 3 See Alan George, “Making the Desert Bloom: a Myth Examined”, Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 8, (...)

2Historians have analyzed agricultural education’s goals and outcomes in individual Middle Eastern Mandates. They describe agricultural education as a site where policymakers and local populations contested educational ideals, as well as nationalism2. There is a vast literature on agriculture and education concentrating on the Yishuv (Palestine’s immigrant Jewish community) and Israel. This historiography has traced how Israeli nationalist narratives of “making the desert bloom” drew on modernizing rhetoric to justify the control of the land3. However, this paper concentrates on government and Arab education. Employing a regional and comparative perspective, I argue that instead of improving agricultural productivity, agricultural schooling across Britain’s Mandates represented an alternative to farming, promising a career in teaching as well as in government service. Independent governments incorporated Mandate-era agricultural education while deploying an intensified rhetoric of development and modernization.

• 4 For a discussion of the implications, pitfalls and counter examples to analyzing each Mandate on i (...)

3Analyzing state-sponsored agricultural education across multiple countries and regimes reveals trends in schooling and farming, as well as shifting relationships between government schooling of any sort and government employment. The borders of the three countries under investigation were newly carved from Ottoman provinces; their people often crossed between each state. Climates, populations, levels of urbanization, and politics differed. Treating each Mandate and subsequent state as a distinct unit allows for efficient comparison, but exaggerates their discrete coherence: textbooks, pedagogical concepts, and educators circulated throughout4.

• 5 James Ralph Jewell, Agricultural Education, Including Nature Study and School Gardens. Washington, (...)
• 6 Carl C. Campbell, The Young Colonials: A Social History of Education in Trinidad and Tobago, 1834- (...)

4Agricultural education expanded worldwide from the 19^th century onward. Increasingly powerful and intrusive states supported vocational education (including agricultural schooling) as a means of training workers: an alternative to academic education. From the rural schools of France to American and Ottoman agricultural colleges, governments hoped to tailor education to students’ needs while fitting government schooling to the needs of each country’s economy5. British colonial officials sought to make agriculture more productive empire-wide, while taking care to educate students, “in such a manner that their ambitions would not run ahead of their social position”6. The Mandate-era’s colonial governments, Iraq’s post-independence dictators and Jordan’s little-changing ruling cadre hoped agricultural schooling would maintain political stability through an urban/rural divide, while improving each country’s economy. However, mundane and political considerations blunted the intended effects of agricultural teaching.

• 7 In Egypt, as opposed to Britain’s Mandates, autobiographies demonstrate how wealthier rural parent (...)

5Without first-hand accounts, diaries, memoirs or oral histories, the relationship of official descriptions to what took place within classrooms on a day-to-day basis in the past is often difficult to determine7. Yet, even very general descriptions of agricultural instruction that concentrate on the aggregate outcomes of educational policies rather than students’ daily socialization, raise questions about how policy-makers and participants instrumentalized schooling.

• 8 Education was less strictly controlled than other spheres of government and foreign policy, deemed (...)

7During World War I, the British and French military administrations assumed responsibility for public education in the former Arab Provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire, in accordance with the Hague Conventions regarding military occupation. British control over schooling varied greatly, across territories and over time. The British allowed Iraqi citizens to hold high-ranking posts in the Department and later Ministry of Education as a concession to Iraqi independence. As a result, although Iraq’s independence was in many ways nominal, with the end of the Iraqi Mandate in 1932, the British retained little influence over education, other than a brief interlude during the Second World War8. In Transjordan, non-British officials ran a very limited school system, restricted by a British-controlled budget. In the Mandate for Palestine, British civil servants led the Department of Education, while Arabs held the majority of positions in the Department.

• 9 Matta Akrawi, Curriculum Construction in the Public Primary Schools of Iraq in the Light of a Stud (...)
• 10 Derek Jonathan Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine (...)

8Mandate administrations had a variety of motivations for improving agricultural education, and agricultural productivity. Local officials hoped to better their societies (and often themselves) through agricultural schooling. They advocated agricultural training as a means of modernization, at times taking the Mandate governments to task for failing in this mission9. The Yishuv viewed agricultural improvements as a sign of fitness to control the land, and as a negation of diaspora images of bookish, wandering Jews10.

• 11 Phyllis Maslow, Economic Development of Iraq, 1914-1932, PhD, University of Chicago, 1951, p. 101.
• 12 In Palestine, and presumably Iraq, British taxpayers funded British troops. Henry Gurney, and Mott (...)
• 13 Tariq Tall, “Nomads, Peasants and the State in Jordan: the Politics of Rural Policy” in Martha Mun (...)
• 14 League of Nations, “The Covenant of the League of Nations Including Amendments Adopted to December (...)

9Higher agricultural output meant more revenue, whether in coin or in kind. The Mandates themselves were meant to be self-sustaining, using local sources of funding rather than those of British taxpayers11. The British sought to increase tax revenue to support the Mandate administrations and, if possible, to promote political stability12. For instance, Transjordan’s government implemented policies that benefitted local cultivators, in the hope of increasing agricultural output while dissuading peasant rebellion13. On a more ideological level, British officials asserted they would bring modern agriculture to the region, thereby furthering their mission to develop the Mandates and civilize their inhabitants14.

• 15 The amount of funding devoted to education in the British Mandates including Palestine hovered bet (...)
• 16 Issa Khalaf, “The Effect of Socioeconomic Change on Arab Societal Collapse in Mandate Palestine”, (...)
• 17 Haim Gerber, The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East. Boulder, L. Rienner, 1987, p. 93-94; Ha (...)

10Regardless of local or British assertions, political, strategic, and economic considerations hampered the results of agricultural initiatives. Implementing large-scale educational and agricultural reforms required funding, which colonial governments doled out parsimoniously to the local population15. The Arab Palestinian community mostly gained their livelihood from agriculture. They faced natural disasters such as locusts and drought, as well as difficulties due to money lending, land ownership structures, and the procedures implemented to sell land to the Yishuv. Despite overall increases in agricultural productivity in Mandate Palestine, higher taxes, rents, and the sale of land to Zionist organizations forced Arab cultivators from their farms and into wage labor, thereby lessening farming’s appeal16. Transjordan’s government lacked funding, and therefore agricultural initiatives. However, Transjordanian students studied abroad, advancing their own careers if not necessarily their country’s agricultural development. In Iraq, British policies promoted the interests of particular sheikhs, concentrating landholding in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals and imposing a type of feudalism, tying cultivators to land they did not own. The power of landowners undermined attempts to improve agriculture, simultaneously reducing the lifespan of Iraqi cultivators17.

• 18 Zvi Zamaret, Fifty Years of Education in the State of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel Information Center (...)
• 19 Aharon F. Kleinberger, Society, Schools and Progress in Israel, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1969, p. 1 (...)

11When Iraq, Jordan and Israel achieved greater degrees of independence, their governments shifted funds towards agricultural education. During the 1950s, agriculture as well as agricultural schooling became more specialized. Strengthened governments began to rely on other sources of income, yet agriculture often remained a subject of study at elementary or primary levels. Israel’s almost excessive “aggrandizement” of agriculture, as a way of countering the diasporic Jewish condition began to lessen as urbanization increased18. Yet, as this idealization of agriculture decreased Israel’s government still made a concerted effort to offer agricultural training in elementary schools. They also created and supported as intermediate, secondary and college-level agricultural institutions, even if these specialized institutions did not produce as many farmers as desired19.

• 20 Joseph Sasson, Economic Policy in Iraq: 1932-1950, London, Routledge, 2012, p. 155.
• 21 Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 69.
• 22 Ibid. p. 138.
• 23 International Bureau of Education, Unesco, International Yearbook of Education, 1953, Vol. 15, Par (...)

12After the end of the Mandates, Jordan and Iraq’s Hashemite administrations implemented new policies, deploying the most modern methods of agriculture in order to improve agricultural productivity. By the 1940s, many of Iraq’s ministers had sought to implement various agricultural schemes, but they faced obstruction on the part of Iraq’s landowners20. When Iraqis did adopt these programs, policies did not necessarily achieve the intended results: for example, incentives for local investment in mechanized irrigation altered soil salinity, decreasing agricultural productivity in newly-irrigated areas21. Oil supplanted agriculture in the government’s priorities during the 1950s: by 1954, agriculture supplied only 3% of the government’s revenue22. Despite agriculture’s diminishing importance for government revenue, agriculture was included as a subject in rural schools, while urban students studied gardening23.

• 24 International Business Publications, Jordan Country Study Guide Strategic Information and Developm (...)
• 25 Munther J. Haddadin, “Evolution of Water Administration and Legislation” in Clive Lipchin, Deborah (...)
• 26 T. Tall, “Nomads, Peasants and the State in Jordan”, art. cit., p. 96-98.

13In Jordan, agriculture represented 40% of the country’s GDP in the 1950s but declined to 17% before the 1967 war24. The Hashemite-run, foreign-supported Jordanian government needed to create jobs, particularly in agriculture in order to maintain political stability in the wake of the tremendous increase in its’ Palestinian population after the 1950s. The government opened new agricultural institutions and adopted new policies, directed by various aid organizations, that increased irrigation and offered rewards for land redistribution25. At the same time, Jordan’s government elites pushed reforms that benefitted their own interests, improving commercial farming on a large scale, while forcing peasants and smallholders into state or eventually service sector employment26.

• 27 Sara Pursley, “Education for Real Life: Pragmatist Pedagogies and American Interwar Expansion in I (...)
• 28 Roderic D. Matthews, Matta Akrawi, Education in Arab Countries of the near East: Egypt, Iraq, Pale (...)
• 29 Ministry of Education Iraq, Wizarat al-Ma’arif Iraq, Annual Report [on] Educational Statistics 194 (...)

16While British and American-trained Iraqi officials advocated agricultural and “practical” schooling, the Ottoman-Arab official in charge of Iraq’s education during much of the 1920s prioritized Arabic and courses that promoted Arab nationalism over agricultural training. He argued (presciently) that teaching schoolchildren farming methods was insufficient to improve agriculture in Iraq overall27. The result of these academic and nationalist vs. vocational debates was that Hashemite-era syllabi included agriculture as an academic subject. Growing numbers of students memorized agricultural information in order to pass examinations, advancing in education rather than farming. The numbers of elementary school students in government schools increased with the power of the Iraqi state: 7 400 in the 1920-21 school year, 38 400 in 1932, and 500 000 in 195828. In 1932 a little over 2 000 students were in intermediate and preparatory-level schools, approximately 11 000 in 1944, and 103 000 in 196029.

• 30 Department of Education, Government Schools of Iraq, Syllabus of the primary course of study”, Bag (...)
• 31 “Curriculum Construction in the Public Primary Schools of Iraq”, art. cit., p. 189.
• 32 Roderic D. Matthews and Matta Akrawi, Education in Arab Countries of the near East, op. cit. p. 15 (...)
• 33 The Ministry of Education of Iraq, Syllabus of the Intermediate School, Bagdad, Government Press, (...)
• 34 Syllabus of the Intermediate School, p. 3, 20.

17The British military administration had included agricultural instruction in the third and fourth years of elementary school, but after 1923, and a decline of British control, agriculture was assigned only in a historical and religious context, and through object lessons30. The primary school syllabus finalized in 1928 noted that object lessons ought to impart “hygienic, agricultural and technical information that no one can do without”. This information, particularly in the second through fourth grades included “plowing, fertilizing, planting, harvesting, threshing, irrigation… [and] principles of raising the most important local vegetables, cereals and trees…”31. In 1943, the elementary school syllabus similarly included “the rudiments of agriculture” in object lessons and in ancient history32, while the intermediate school syllabus proscribed “agriculture and manufacturing” along with “cleanliness and courage, anger and justice, truth and lies…” in one hour per week of religious lessons33. In 7^th to 9^th grade, students also learned about agriculture in history (the agricultural practices of the Ancient Greeks)34.

• 35 Anees Adil, “Recommendations and Proposals for a Science Program for the First Nine Grades Based o (...)
• 36 Abdul Hamid Kadhim, A Plan for the Reconstruction of Teacher Education in Iraq, Teachers College C (...)
• 37 Taqrir Al-Sanawi, Al-Ihsa Al-Tarbawi 1961, p. 13, 31.

18Rudiments of agriculture, references to agriculture in history, and object lessons, required students to memorize concepts related to agriculture, in order to pass Iraqi government examinations, as opposed to actually practicing agriculture. Representations took precedence over their application. Agriculture was flattened into an academic subject, which inevitably distanced students from agricultural practice, both mentally and physically35. Passing exams allowed students from rural or urban areas to gain access to upper levels of Iraqi schooling, and through schooling, to employment36. Into the independence period, government education tended to focus on academic subjects rather than agriculture, particularly once it had become a less defining feature of the Iraqi economy. By 1960, references to agriculture in the primary school syllabus were erased. “General life information” or “object lessons and hygiene” courses after 1960 may have included agriculture, but in Iraq’s preparatory and intermediate schools, agriculture had disappeared from the curriculum37.

• 38 Roderic D. Matthews, Matta Akrawi, Education in Arab Countries of the Near East, op. cit., p. 236; (...)
• 39 Government of Palestine Department of Education, Elementary School Syllabus: Revised Edition, Jeru (...)
• 40 Government of Palestine Department of Education, Department of Education Annual Report, 1928-1929,(...)
• 41 Abdul Latif Tibawi, Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine, op. cit., p. 245-246.

19In contrast to Iraq’s diminution of agricultural study, Palestine’s emphasis on agriculture in elementary government schools increased over the Mandate period, as colonial policymakers as well as some local intellectuals and notables sought to improve the lot of the fellahin, as well as to stem the rising tide of urbanization. The number of government school students grew from 11 000 overall in 1920, to 19 000 elementary school students in 1925, 77 ,000 by 194638. Town schools did not assign agriculture, but teachers were encouraged to develop school gardens and agricultural instruction if time and space allowed. In addition, students could compete with one another to produce the best garden plot39. In order to counter the lure of the city, policymakers promoted a more rural and agricultural bias in village elementary schools, which offered four 45-minute periods of agricultural instruction and handiwork weekly in the second and third year40. Despite the government’s intentions to keep the population rural, the two best-performing students in each Arab government school were admitted, free of charge, to the Arab College of Jerusalem, the top Government school in the Mandate for Palestine, where they would train to be teachers or go on to higher education. This meant paradoxically success in agricultural lessons and in schooling overall granted rural children an avenue towards white-collar work. Approximately two-thirds of the College’s students were from rural areas41.

• 42 Ahmad Yousef Al-Tall, Education in Jordan: Being a Survey of the Political, Economic and Social Co (...)
• 43 Ibid. p. 74.
• 44 Ibid. p. 75.

20As in Palestine and Iraq, government schooling in Transjordan, including agricultural instruction, offered the country’s overwhelmingly rural population opportunities for economic and social advancement. Both the Mandate and the more powerful post-independence administrations, viewed teaching agriculture as a way to develop the country while limiting the dangers of a more academic education in terms of fomenting rebellions. As a result, the elementary school syllabi included agriculture, but it was also substituted for religion as an exam topic in primary schools for non-Muslim students42. Village elementary schools taught practical agriculture rather than the English language, “to give the village pupils an orientation in manual work in agriculture in order to be better prepared to accept village life”43. Village life presumably would not require instruction in English, a language reserved for government bureaucrats and secondary school teachers. Agriculture was taught in the (few and urban) secondary schools for two periods per week44.

• 45 “Nomads, Peasants and the State in Jordan: the Politics of Rural Policy”, art. cit., p. 96-98.
• 46 Jordan Wizarat al-Tarbiyah wa-al-Talim, Al-Taqrir Al-Sanawi 1958-1959-Wizarat all-Tarbiyah Wa-al-T (...)
• 47 Ahmad Yousef Al-Tall, Education in Jordan, op. cit., p. 75.
• 48 Ibid.
• 49 Ibid., p. 106.

21In the 1950s, King Abdullah and a cadre of Mandate-era officials continued to view agricultural instruction as a way of limiting social mobility and urbanization, thereby counteracting policies inducing peasants to leave farming45. Jordan depended on foreign aid and faced a huge influx of Palestinian refugees. For the government, agricultural education represented a way to keep the country’s growing population, both Jordanian and Palestinian Jordanian from rebelling. Government policies aimed at sending students to agricultural schools (at home and abroad), while increasing their desire for rural life, respect for manual labor and self-reliance46. Through the end of the 1950s, students in the fourth through sixth year of primary school spent one period a week on “agricultural activities” in addition to working in school gardens47. The total number of elementary schools grew from 77 in 1946 to 1 519 in 196048. Increased access to education meant, however, more opportunities for social mobility; as a result the government increasingly feared the emergence of new, educated elites, both Jordanian- and Palestinian-born49.

• 50 Isam al-Khafaji, Tormented Births: Passages to Modernity in Europe and the Middle East, London, I. (...)

22Beyond agricultural instruction in lower-level government schools, rural teachers’ training centers, across Palestine, Iraq and later Jordan devoted still more time to practical and theoretical agriculture, while guaranteeing a job behind a desk rather than a plow. Centers aimed at training village teachers to improve agriculture, and rural schoolchildren’s health. These teachers would, according to their governments, return to their villages rather than gravitate to the city. Governments sought to stem the tide of rural migrants to urban areas; when conditions for farmers deteriorated, cities offered (often false) promises of employment. Potentially volatile slums in Baghdad, Basra and eventually Haifa spurred government fears of rebellion50. Rural training centers were meant to expand education, while reinforcing an urban/rural divide. Still, becoming a village teacher guaranteed a steady salary and a way out of sharecropping, naturally leading to shifts in the social lives of villages as well.

• 51 Roderic D. Matthews, Matta Akrawi, Education in Arab Countries of the near East, op. cit., p. 184- (...)

23Iraq’s Rural Teachers’ College, established 14 kilometers south of Baghdad in 1934, helped Iraqis who were unable to attend more academic institutions gain a foothold as teachers in the civil service. The three–later five–year course of study involved six hours per week of “practical and theoretical training in agriculture” in addition to first aid and hygiene. In the later years of the course, students learned dairying, poultry breeding, and pedagogy. One of these rural institutes included a government farm. Enrollment at the rural institutes ranged from a few hundred to more than 1,000 at a time, during the 1930s and 1940s. The Iraqi government hoped to entice poorer, rural students to these institutions, by paying students’ tuition as well as room and board. Rural teachers’ training centers were relatively more popular than purely agricultural colleges as students became teachers, not agriculturalists, after graduation. In the mid-1940s, the staff and instructors of the schools had little agricultural training, indicating that the course prepared better teachers than tillers of the land51.

• 52 Abdul Latif Tibawi, Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine, op. cit., p. 230; Ela Greenberg, Prepar (...)
• 53 Government of Palestine, “The Unpublished Mandate Report for the Year 1940” in Palestine and Trans (...)

24Like its’ Iraqi and Jordanian counterparts, the government of the Mandate for Palestine’s rural teacher training center intended to train village teachers to improve village life. The Palestinian institution, founded in 1936 in Ramallah, admitted only women, in order to alleviate the shortage of female teachers in rural areas. Indeed the limited number of educated women in the Mandate for Palestine were frequently from towns, often Christian, with little desire to work in rural, often Muslim majority areas52. By 1940, when a third year was added to the school’s course, it had 25 students, studying “women’s agricultural occupations” in addition to “child-welfare, house management and general village hygiene”53. A former Director of Education praised the center as having adapted the elementary school curriculum to

• 55 Great Britain Palestine Royal Commission, “Palestine Royal Commission: Minutes of Evidence Heard a (...)
• 56 The following teachers were born in urban areas: the first five taught in rural areas; “Saniya Zu’ (...)
• 57 “Saniya Zu'bi I'bilin Girls School” ISA 1038/18 M, “Balqis Ghannoum” ISA 1039/28 M.

25According to the former Director, the school improved health and hygiene by producing ideal peasant women: lower-class teachers, who would subsequently become as well as train thrifty, modern, wives and mothers. However, local demand for new schools meant that graduates found ready work as teachers, and often postponed marriage55. Extant personnel files on graduates of the center indicate students came from urban as well as rural areas and that they taught in both. Of the eighteen personnel files that remain, fifteen teachers were born in more urban areas, and only eight taught in rural areas during their careers56. Still, the emphasis on manual training tended to impede girls’ advancement even in education, as Mandate Palestine’s educational system prized English-language skills over domestic prowess. Government officials emphasized the value of practical training for village women. However, the Rural Training Institute’s poor academics meant several graduates were not qualified for classified teaching posts, forcing them to become “unclassified” teachers57. Then again, the Rural Training Center allowed more of the female village population to attend school and to earn a living. After 1948, the Jordanian government incorporated this institution into its educational system, but as a purely academic institution.

• 58 Jordan Wizarat al-Tarbiyah wa-al-Ta lim, Al-Taqrir Al-Sanawi 1955-1956-Wizarat Al-Tarbiyah Wa-Al-T (...)
• 59 Ibid, p. 10.

26Conversely, Jordan created a training center for rural male teachers during the 1952-1953 school year. Its graduates were meant to “raise the level” of the villages to which they were assigned. Their course of study included practical agriculture (working in the institute’s field), agricultural instruction, raising poultry and rabbits, studying animal and plant illnesses (and their prevention) as well as bi-weekly village visits, to learn about local issues, and to try to solve them58. The Ministry of Education’s 1956 report proclaimed the school was to reform small villages in rural Jordan, and that teachers would play a key role promoting modern education and improving the lives and awareness of villagers. In addition “practical” agricultural training, students had to learn all academic subjects, up to the level of a high school equivalence59. The emphasis on practical training notwithstanding, the school itself was explicitly geared towards the production of teachers. These teachers were not to farm the land themselves, but rather to instruct villagers on how to do so, while addressing a myriad of other social and economic problems in the villages.

• 60 This expands Sherene Seikaly’s discussions of family in Mandate Palestine; she portrays static cla (...)

27Few students attended rural training centers during the Mandate period, although their numbers increased during the 1950s and 1960s. There are few references to the effects of these graduates on agriculture. Rather, every graduate escaped the fate of their families and their communities, becoming teachers rather than fellahin60. The following section analyzes the type of agricultural work village teachers were expected to perform, specifically the supervision of school gardens. School gardens were well known in Iraq and widespread in Palestine and Transjordan. They also mark the broadest contribution of the Mandate governments to Arab agricultural education.

• 61 Brian Trelstad, “Little Machines in Their Gardens: A History of School Gardens in America, 1891 to (...)
• 62 Howard A. Fergus, A History of Education in the British Leeward Islands 1838-1945, Kingston, Unive (...)

28From the interwar period through the 1950s, school gardens became a familiar feature of education throughout the Middle East. An offshoot of the 19^th-century global nature study movement, school gardens worldwide were meant not only to improve students’ well-being, but also to increase political stability, by assimilating immigrants in urban slums61, or by encouraging children to remain “agricultural laborers”62. However, in Britain’s Middle Eastern Mandates, having a garden at school failed to convince either students or their parents of the desirability of farming.

• 63 Great Britain Colonial Office and the Council of the League of Nations, Report by His Majesty's Go (...)
• 64 Permanent Mandates Commission League of Nations, “Minutes of the Twenty-Second Session, Held at Ge (...)
• 65 The British feared the growth of educated, articulated nationalists who would foment revolutions a (...)
• 66 “British Agricultural-Educational Institutions in Mandate Palestine and Their Impress on the Rural (...)
• 67 Roderic D. Matthews, Matta Akrawi, Education in Arab Countries of the near East, op. cit., p. 245.

29A report by the British Mandate Government of Palestine to the League of Nations in Palestine idealized village school gardens as places where “the pupils, who are to form the next generation of cultivators, are taught simple farming practice under the supervision of Government instructors”63. The British-run Department of Agriculture in Palestine added, “we hope to give elementary but very practical teaching in the planting of fruit-trees and vegetables, poultry-breeding, etc.”64. Ideally, this “very practical teaching” would keep elementary school students as productive laborers in rural areas65. School gardens offered detailed instruction in agricultural practices on a small scale. In the gardens of Palestine, for instance, students, possessing their own plots in higher grades, learnt terracing as well as how to plant and cultivate a variety of crops, plying “steel ploughs, harrows, hoes, cultivators, shovels, wheelbarrows”66 in order to grow vegetables, fruit trees and cereals67. Depending on the schools’ resources, students might also study bee keeping and poultry raising.

• 68 Ibid., p. 157. These schools are not mentioned in the report of the Ministry of Education in the s (...)
• 69 Dr. Abdul Amir Al-Aboud, Iraq: A Minister’s Memoir, trans. Abdul Amir al-Aboud, Author House, 2015 (...)
• 70 A. Al-Tall, Education in Jordan, op. cit. p. 306, 310.
• 71 Al-Taqrir Al-Sanawi 1958-1959, p. 10, 61.
• 72 Department of Education Government of Palestine, "Annual Report for the School Year 1936-1937”, Je (...)

30The number of school gardens varied, according to policymakers’ goals and funding availability. Iraq had the fewest school gardens of the three areas, due to the academic emphasis its curricula. By the late 1940s, an unspecified number of “new model farm schools” in Iraq included attached gardens, where graduates of Iraq’s School of Agriculture taught hands-on methods to elementary school children68. A former student in al-Majer al-Kaber praised his elementary school’s farm and garden that “supplied the city with milk, chickens and eggs”69. Conversely, in Transjordan, by the end of the Mandate period, nearly half of village schools had school gardens70. By the end of the 1950s, Jordan’s school gardens had increased from 34 to 186, although the number of government schools grew far more: from 74 to 97171. Similarly, in Palestine, over half of government elementary schools, in both towns and villages had school gardens: the number of gardens increased from 209 to 248 between 1936 and 1946, the number of elementary schools from 380 to 50972.

• 73 “Communication number 32 from the Director of Education to the Principal of the school of Kura”, N (...)
• 74 “Communication 7, from the Director of education to the Principal of the school of Kura”, NLJ, 1/6 (...)
• 75 “Letter from the director of the district of Kura to the commander of the station at Kura, subject (...)

31Transjordan’s official reports painted a rosy picture of the growth in number of school gardens. Convincing local children and villagers to benefit from (or not destroy) these agricultural initiatives was more difficult. In 1932, the Director of Education wrote that every principal or teacher must have a garden for his or her school, in order to practice agriculture. Principals and teachers were required to report to the Ministry of Education the number and type of plants within the garden73. Concern for these initiatives, can be seen in the Director of Education’s warning to the principal of the school of Kura that the new plants in the school garden, which had been “grown through great efforts,” were “vulnerable during school holidays to acts of sabotage or vandalism by locals”. The Director of Education required the school’s staff to record all of the plantings, sharing their list with the local headmen and elders, “so that if there is even the slightest shortage” then the community and government would know74. Locals did not always support the gardens (or the government). For example, one letter notes that villagers used a well earmarked for a school garden for themselves75. Despite this uneven process of implementation, school gardens remained a feature of Jordanian education through the end of the 1950s.

• 76 Roderic D. Matthews, Matta Akrawi, Education in Arab Countries of the near East, op. cit., p. 546.
• 77 Ibid., p. 235-236.
• 78 Roza El-Eini, Mandated Landscape, op. cit., p. 152.

32The impact of school gardens on agricultural practices, and concurrently the development and modernization of villagers is difficult to measure. Sources criticizing the situation reflect more local and foreign academics’ views of ideal education, rather than the situation on the ground. For example, Roderic Matthews and Matta Akrawi’s report on education in the 1940s criticized curricula throughout the region as “bookish and academic, borrowed from abroad, and designed to prepare for the passing of examinations”. The report lauded the spread of school gardens, especially in Palestine, but noted “little sign of any attempt to tie up the activities of the school with those of the community”76. Abdul Latif Tibawi, a student in the schools of Mandate Palestine, a former Inspector of Education and historian, summarized Matthews and Akrawi’s argument: “agricultural instruction in schools was not in the opinion of the writers, bearing fruits (sic) in the form of tangible social advance in the village life.” Teaching agriculture and gardening to a few nine to eleven years-old boys, “sons of farmers, practically familiar with the subject and accustomed quite early in their life to all types of agricultural labor…” could not affect change, “…at any rate not [change] of such depth as to show itself in the improvement of the methods of farming”77. Yet, in Palestine, some families provided land for the school gardens, which indicates a degree of local enthusiasm for the projects78.

• 79 B.A. Keen, The Agricultural Development of the Middle East, London, H.M.S.O, 1946, p. 41.

33Bureaucratic turf wars, and frustration at the political and economic situation in rural areas overall seem to have muted the effects of school gardens79. As a former student in a rural school in Palestine argued the

• 81 Jordan Wizarat al-Tarbiyah wa-al-Ta lim, Al-Taqrir Al-Sanawi 1953-1954-Wizarat Al-Tarbiyah Wa-Al-T (...)

35Despite the Mandate governments for Iraq and Palestine, and the post-Mandate governments of Iraq and Jordan’s stated goals, each state supported agricultural institutes that trained teachers and officials rather than farmers. Iraq’s agricultural college proved a poor experiment until the 1960s, failing to provide white-collar jobs (or indeed any jobs) to its graduates. In Palestine, political and practical troubles reduced the college’s effect on agriculture, although its students found work as teachers and agricultural experts. Jordan did not have institutions devoted to agriculture until the 1950s, inheriting Palestine’s agricultural college along with the West Bank, and founding new institutions in suburbs by the late 1950s81. The Jordanian government took care to employ these institutions’ graduates as civil servants, fearing, as the British had before them, that a glut of the educated unemployed would lead to political instability.

• 82 Roderic D. Matthews and Matta Akrawi, Education in Arab Countries of the near East, op. cit., p. 1 (...)
• 83 Ibid.

36The Iraqi School of Agriculture’s rather ineffective history began in 1921 when the government approved funds for the college building in hopes of filling the country’s “need for local personnel trained in modern agricultural science”82. Although the building was finished by 1923, there was nowhere for students or teachers to live nearby, which prevented the college from opening. In 1926 Iraq’s parliament agreed to fund the construction of living quarters for the college; the school opened, with tents for students before construction was finished. Iraq’s government had intended the college to provide a post-secondary course of study in modern agriculture. The government even went so far as to pay students’ tuition and board in order to entice them to matriculate. The school comprised a three-year course of education beyond the intermediate level, including Arabic, English, “practical agriculture”, organic chemistry, irrigation, dairying, agricultural machinery, and chicken-breeding”83.

• 84 Wizarat al-Ma`arif Iraq, Al-Taqrir Al-Sanawi `an Sayr Al-Ma`arif 1928-1929, Bagdad, Wizarat al-Ma` (...)
• 85 Roderic D. Matthews and Matta Akrawi, Education in Arab Countries of the near East, op. cit., p. 1 (...)
• 86 The Iraq Government Gazette, no. 22, May 31, 1936, p. 304.
• 87 Education in Arab Countries of the near East, p. 178-179.
• 88 Mahir Qaysi, Youth Education in Iraq and Egypt, 1920-1980: A Contribution to Comparative Education (...)
• 89 Education in Arab Countries of the near East, p. 179.

37Designed to encourage the sons of landowners and tribal leaders to modernize agriculture, the college attracted boys seeking government employment. In 1929, the Ministry of Education asserted the college’s purpose was “to increase those who are familiar with the foundations of modern agriculture in order to help… in the farms and not in order to create employees”84. As a degree from the college did not always result in a government job, it only drew students from the Teachers’ Training College in Baghdad, which promised students government posts85. In 1932, a combination of language conflicts (teaching in English was too difficult for the students, teaching in Arabic likewise for the often foreign professors) primarily foreign textbooks, and lack of interest, resulted in the college’s closure. A rural teachers’ training college, whose graduates were assured a government post, took over the building. The Agricultural College reopened in the mid-1930s86. By 1945, the school could accommodate 200 students; less than half of that number actually attended. This indicates a lack of interest despite continued incentives of free tuition, room and board. As Matthews and Akrawi noted, “Apparently there is little demand for trained agriculturists except in government employment where vacancies are fewer than applicants”87. If graduates of agricultural schools were unable to find employment, they could not put their new knowledge into practice, as they owned no land of their own88. However, the few students who graduated from the Agricultural College in the 1940s evidently gained positions in government employment: the Ministry of Agriculture or the Ministry of Education employed all but one of the 48 graduates in 194589.

• 90 The Iraq Times, no. 10 467, January 6, 1953.
• 91 Victor Clark, Compulsory Education in Iraq, Paris, UNESCO, 1951, p. 135.

38By the early 1950s, there was a proposal to distribute agricultural lands to college graduates in the hopes of convincing them to become farmers. However, as an article in a local paper, Al Zaman noted, “It is unfortunate that the Ministry of Education during its 30 years in existence has been ‘a factory for producing government employees only’”90. Into the 1950s, agricultural education remained unpopular: only 31.67% of surveyed Iraqis desired agricultural education, 44% were positive towards vocational schooling, and 80% preferred general education from the government91.

• 92 “Subject: Sir Ellis Kadoorie’s Bequest” 28 July 1931. National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom NA, A (...)
• 93 Palestine Royal Commission, p. 27.
• 94 The Department of Agriculture, Mandate for Palestine. “The Syllabus of the Kadoorie Agricultural S (...)

39As in Iraq, the few agricultural schools sponsored by the Mandate Government in Palestine tended to train teachers rather than farmers. The pinnacle of Arab agricultural education in Palestine and Transjordan from the Mandate period through the 1950s was the Kadoorie Agricultural School. The bequest of Sir Ellis Kadoorie, an Iraqi Jew established the college, which opened in 1931 in the rapidly growing town of Tulkarm. This bequest also funded a Jewish Kadoorie School at Mt. Tabor, after both the Arab and Jewish communities rejected an alternative proposal to found only one institution92. The object of both Kadoorie schools was, “to provide practical courses of agriculture… so that when the students return to their own lands they may not only develop their own farms, but encourage the adoption of improved farm practices…”93. The syllabus of the Arab college included a variety of specialized subjects: agricultural zoology, bacteriology, crop rotation, farm accountancy, cooperation and marketing, horticulture and forestry, stone fruits, orchard irrigation, vegetable farming, tropical fruits, forest conservation, and other subjects94.

• 95 Roderic D. Matthews, Matta Akrawi, The British Educational Policy in the Arab Public Schools of Pa (...)
• 96 “Fuad Assad Qaddura Shafa 'Amar” ISA 1037/18 M.
• 97 Palestine and Transjordan Administration Reports, 1918-1948: Vol. 3, 1929-1931, 16 vols, Slough, A (...)
• 98 Government of Palestine, Staff List of the Government of Palestine as on the 1st August, 1945 Jeru (...)
• 99 “Letter from the principal of Kadoorie Agricultural School, Tulkarm to prospective entrants”, July (...)
• 100 Abdul Latif Tibawi, Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine, op. cit., p. 51.

40Despite its farming-oriented curriculum, only three or four graduates of the school actually worked on farms. While a few became inspectors for the department of agriculture, the majority worked as teachers, making their way up through the civil service95. For example, Fuad Assad Qaddura attended the Kadoorie School, worked as a teacher, and eventually transferred to a better post in the Forestry Department of the Mandate for Palestine96. The Kadoorie School was meant to admit a majority of rural Arabs as stated in the 1930 report to the League of Nations, “sons of landowners or practical farmers were given preference in all cases”97, however, “many town students without land property and sometimes without interest in the field” were also admitted. The principal and instructors at the college represented some of the more elite families in Palestine98. Kadoorie’s principal attempted to dissuade government job seekers from attending; he wrote aspiring students in 1937 that the goal of the school was agricultural training, improving students’ and their families’ land rather than their careers in bureaucracy99. However, Kadoorie became a training center for rural educators. Thus, another Mandate-era institution meant to train enlightened farmers in fact produced teachers, who in turn joined the ranks of the civil service100.

• 101 Dairat al-Matbu`at wa-al-Nashr Wizarat al-Thaqafah wa-al-I`lam, Al-Urdun Fi Khamsin `Amm, 1921-197 (...)
• 102 Idārat al-mawārid al-basharīyah, Qism al-Arshīf, Wizārat at-Tarbiya wa-'t-Taʻlīm, al-Mamlaka (...)

41In Transjordan and Jordan, specialized agricultural education was limited, due to a lack of funding as well as its unpopularity. Jordan’s Ministry of Agriculture founded several agricultural institutions, from the preparatory to the college level in the mid-1950s. Yet, the only way to convince students to go to agricultural rather than academic secondary schools was either to restrict admission to non-vocational institutions or to offer students white-collar jobs as well, which –in the government’s–view would defeat the purpose101. Through the end of the 1950s, the Jordanian Government adopted the latter tactic. Approximately 50 teachers graduate from the Kadoorie School which was integrated Jordan’s educational system after 1948 and began teaching before 1958. Many of them obtained high-ranking posts, becoming principals of schools, inspectors of school gardens or even heads of department102. A degree from an agricultural school counted as an academic degree, enabling its students to start with a higher paygrade in the government civil service and to advance from there.

• 103 Victor Clark, Compulsory Education in Iraq, op. cit., p. 19-20.
• 104 Ylana N. Miller, From Village to Nation: Government and Society in Rural Palestine, 1920-1948, Ber (...)

42Victor Clark, an American researcher in Iraq in the 1950s noted policymakers in Iraq’s educational system had paid little attention to the perhaps insurmountable economic and social problems facing the majority of Iraqis. As Clark put it, those who advocated compulsory education as a way of improving agriculture, “functionally divorced the social force of education from other social forces which were actually governing the dynamics of Iraqi life”103. Whether or not agricultural education improved Iraqi, Palestinian and Jordanian society, those who were able to gain access to education improved themselves. Through education, villagers joined the civil service, becoming teachers in rural areas rather than farmers as a way of ensuring a regular paycheck104. Across the region, the Mandates, and into the transition from colonial to post-colonial states, education offered a means of social mobility: the lucky few who obtained any schooling beyond a secondary, or even an elementary level gained a clear path to government service. Those who went to elementary schools, worked in school gardens, and attended higher institutes of agricultural learning in the Mandates were able to gain a foothold in the civil service; very few it seems were content to return to their farms.