Education has always been a privilege
As the world goes back to school, it’s time for us to reflect on the worth of our degrees amidst Israel's genocide in Gaza
In late 2024, I was on video call with a Palestinian woman named Leena Almadhoun, a local organizer, student, and co-founder of a food sovereignty initiative in Gaza called Thamra. As a writer, I planned to ask her about how she and her team in North Gaza managed to transform poisonous soil and the aftermath of bombs into urban gardening sanctuaries for local Gazans. But the conversation soon derailed into the emotional grief and psychological pain of losing lived spaces—schools, universities, and community centers—that held memories, experiences, and futures in them.
Before Israel’s genocide, Almadhoun was studying psychological sciences at the Islamic University of Gaza, a prominent academic institution renowned for being the birthplace of many Palestinian scholars and thinkers. But under Israel’s genocide and Gaza’s subsequent conditions, what once were bustling classrooms and lecture halls for Palestine’s youth, are now bomb shelters and makeshift medical centers.
I can bombard you with statistics about the extent of damage or about how hundreds of thousands have not received formal schooling in over two years. But instead, I’ll leave you with a thought from Almadhoun: “despite our living in siege, we are resistant people, but are not given the opportunity to live. We have a future, dreams and ambitions, like my dream to finish university.”
As campus life starts back up again at U of T, we have a responsibility to use our education—our knowledge, our voices of truth and compassion, and our coordinated action—to bring a semblance of on-going justice to students around the world who are not allowed to be students. How are we, as students of the imperial core, positioned to take on the enormity of colonial institutes that is enabled through the dehumanization of others? Like most answers, it starts in our own classrooms.
Education as a colonial strategy
In the last couple of months, Israel’s genocide on Gaza has weaponized colonial tactics of forced starvation and intensified brutality to render the Palestinian people weak and defenceless. And while bombed universities, malnutrition, the annihilation of families at aid distribution centers, and the imperial core’s complicity in all of it has left us paralyzed with grief and anger, it’s also not a new phenomena.
Education is a colonial strategy in two main ways—and each feeds into the other. Firstly, what is taught and not taught in classrooms is a direct expression of prevailing attitudes and discourses at the time, which are shaped by ideologies and systems that have historically held the most power. As a colonial project, education seeks to supplant indigenous knowledge with knowledge created for and by the white world. It seeks to narrow the diversity of thought that resists established hierarchies and instead create a servile workforce.
These are ideas laid down in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. In it, Freire touches on education as a “practice of freedom;” how the privilege of education is precisely that it allows the active participation and creation of society. This connects with the other—more true—purpose of education, which is to have access to a future where one is autonomous and liberated. For Palestinian students in Gaza—and all oppressed people around the world—education is simply a right to a future. This is the other method of colonial education strategy: by severing a peoples’ right to a future, you stop liberation before it even starts.
In fact, at one point in my conversation with Almadhoun, she says that her only wish is to return to university. The right to education is closely linked to the right to return for displaced people. And all of this is tied to the right to life.
A second-grade Palestinian child stands before a chalkboard, explaining her drawing of war: planes dropping bombs, families running, and shelters for safety. January 15, 1980.
As a part of its colonial endeavours, Israel and supporting western nations not only consolidate power through physical destruction, but by robbing Palestinians of the necessary tools for sovereignty-building, nation-building, movement-building, and identityhood. When you don’t have the safety of classrooms, how can you be expected to learn about your country’s history? When children living through occupation and genocide are forced to be on survival mode, how are they supposed to take ownership over a future that seems so fragile, so extinguishable?
It starts in the classroom
Since the genocide’s inception, world-renouned education activist Malala Yousafzai—a person we all looked up to—has stayed dangerously silent on Palestinian lives, and only after repeated backlash, has she resorted to regurgitating whitewashed talking points at the expense of true solidarity. For someone who has built her entire brand and public identity around supporting education and women’s rights, Yousafzai’s silence on the state of education and the indiscriminate targeting of journalists, teachers, and other vulnerable populations in Gaza speaks volumes. Why are activists like Yousafzai working so hard to cater to all feelings, to a one-size-fits-all activism? I am eerily aware that her quietness—and that of countless others—has something to do with dollarism, a term coined by Malcom X referring to the “purchase of influence.”
But Yousafzai is only one person in a much larger charade of hypocrisy and enablement. We saw how earlier this year, the Trump administration began their fascistic crackdown on public education by attacking and defunding major universities like Harvard and Columbia. Humanities programs, DEI protections, and the right to freedom of speech and activism on campuses are all being threatened in an effort to stifle critical discussions and actions. But herein lies the paradox of education in this new age of global awareness: we are more aware than ever about how our systems fail to serve us. Elitists are outnumbered by the majority who want a better world. We know the enemy and its many faces. Now is not the time to be fooled.
Education is not just about sitting in classrooms, handing in assignments, or getting a piece of paper at the end of your degree. Education, fundamentally, is a dynamic process of learning and unlearning about the complex world we live in so that we can become better thinkers and citizens. The unforgiving job markets of today and hustle culture, as well as broader techno-cultural shifts, have deluded us into valuing education only as it serves our economic destinies as individuals: getting a well-paying job, buying things, and creating safe, stable lives for us all.
I’d love that as much as the next person, and I am not trying to moralize this by saying it’s wrong to want those things. What I am saying is that if education is a human right the way we say it is, we, as more privileged students, have a responsibility to use our rights to further the rights of others, especially those silenced and stripped by our complicity. Not as a pitied obligation, fashioned as an act of charitable activism, but because it is a right of life. Because on the other side of this lies the difference between collective liberation and oppression.
Opinion Editor (Volume 51); Associate Opinion Editor (Volume 50) — Mashiyat (Mash) is a third-year student studying Neuroscience and Professional Writing and Communication (PWC). As this year’s Opinion Editor, Mash hopes to use her writing, editorial, and leadership skills in supporting student journalism in the essential role it plays in fostering intellectual freedom and artistic expression on campuses. When she’s not writing or slaving away at school, Mash uses her free time cooking cultural dishes, striking up conversations with strangers, and being anxious about her nebulous career plans. You can connect with Mash on her LinkedIn.