Egypt imported the English Lancaster school model directly from its factory system

Evidence

The Lancaster or ‘mutual improvement’ schools had been developed for the instruction of the industrial classes in England. A group of twenty Egyptians had been sent to study at Joseph Lancaster’s Central School in London in the 1820s, and in 1843 Adham himself had recently returned from England, where he had been sent to study the organisation of factories. The Lancaster school, like the factory, consisted of a single large room, which contained rows of benches with individually numbered places for up to a thousand pupils. Each bench constituted a ‘class’ of eight or ten pupils, and was under the supervision of a senior pupil who monitored the behaviour and work of the other students. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 225

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s disciplinary institutions and to Milgrom’s institutional-design work—both about how authority gets distributed in space.