Egyptian reformers conceived schooling, assembly, and press as one disciplinary apparatus

Evidence

The case of Jarwish can remind us that the new discipline of education was to be implemented not only through organised schooling. Schooling was only a part of the wider political process of discipline and instruction. Husayn al-Marsafi, the senior professor at the new government teacher training college, set up in the same period to produce instructors for the village schools, explained that there were three parts to the meaning of education – three institutions in which this new hold upon the individual would be developed: the school, the political assembly, and the press. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 306 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In making the substitution the editor had repeated a transformation in vocabulary and in thinking that actually occurred in nineteenth-century Egypt. The word tartib, meaning such things as ‘arrangement (into ranks)’, ‘organisation’, ‘discipline’, ‘rule’, ‘regulation’ (hence even ‘government’), was replaced in the field of learning where it had come to be universally used by the like-sounding word tarbiya. Until perhaps the last third of the nineteenth century tarbiya had meant simply ‘to breed’ or ‘to cultivate’, referring, as in English, to anything that should be helped to grow – the cotton crop, cattle or the morals of children. It came to mean ‘education’, the new field of practices developed in the last third of the century. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 303 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Like the practitioners of other crafts he would give instruction in his art, an art that had a common prominence and value because of the critical importance of the sacred word in communal life. This instruction would take place in a mosque or a room, at the tomb of a local saint or in larger towns in a building erected at the public fountain, the sabil (there was an important connection between the power of words and the propitious use of water). Such a place might be referred to as the kuttab, though the word conveys not only the sense of a place but of a practice, the practices associated with writing and in particular with the Quran. To explain the fiqi as a school teacher is clearly inappropriate, and leads inevitably once again to observations of the sort that the curriculum of the ‘school’ was restricted to the memorising of a single text, the Quran. Schooling did not exist before the last third of the nineteenth century, and it was not the purpose of any distinct individual or institution to give organised instruction. The fiqi’s role was formed within an idiom of the power of words and the problems of vulnerability and powerlessness. It was this very idiom of powerlessness that the system of education was to oppose, offering instead, as we have seen, an idiom of indiscipline and disorder. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 300 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Egyptian education officially redefined tarbiya as coordination and drilled performance rather than growth; Colonial-era Egyptian elites saw schooling, assembly, and press as one disciplinary apparatus — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 306; The term education in Egypt shifted from cultivation to disciplinary coordination of individuals — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 305 (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial-era Egyptian elites saw schooling, assembly, and press as one disciplinary apparatus #corroborates (0.95) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 306
• The concept of education replaced ‘discipline’ and ‘organisation’ in Egyptian vocabulary. #complicates (0.78) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 303
• Organized schooling did not exist in Egypt before the 1870s #complicates (0.75) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 300