Egypt’s first parliament was conceived as a school to discipline and instruct the population.

Evidence

‘Our parliament’, it was explained, ‘is a school, by means of which the government, more advanced than the population, instructs and civilises that population.’ The education of the population was taken up immediately by the Assembly, not only as a metaphor to convey the idea of the political process, but as its major practical method. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 267

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: ‘government is a school’ as a recurring figure across societies — how parliamentary bodies from Egypt’s 1866 chamber to modern civic-education programs cast political institutions as pedagogical.
• CANDY: A pithy, tweetable frame: an early parliament explicitly described itself as a school for civilizing its own people.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 267