Egypt’s school pyramid literally mirrored its social class hierarchy

Evidence

Second, schooling was divided into three stages, primary, preparatory, and final. By specifying the separate ranks of people eligible for each successive stage of schooling, a social order was represented in the exact form of a pyramid of social classes. Primary instruction was to be for all children, boys and girls, rich and poor alike. … Higher education, on the other hand, was for the political elite (arbab al-siyasat wa-l-ri’asat). Each person who sought to study at the higher level had to be someone of wealth and status, so that devoting his time to his studies did no damage to the country. It would be harmful for someone who had an occupation from which he earned a living, and from which others benefitted, to leave that occupation and enter the realm of higher learning. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 271

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the pyramid motif throughout the book so far, and to Bourdieu-style reproduction-of-hierarchy arguments about education.
• SEED: Angle: how the apparently neutral ‘pyramid’ shape of modern schooling is really a naturalized template for unequal social order — worth an essay comparing Egypt’s 19th-century law to today’s tiered education systems.