Modern education as an isolated disciplined process is a nineteenth-century invention

Evidence

Education, as an isolated process in which children acquire a set of instructions and self-discipline, was born in Egypt in the nineteenth century. Before that, there was no distinct location or institution where such a process was carried on, no body of adults for whom it was a profession, and no word for it in the language. To refer to centres of scholarship such as al-Azhar as places of ‘traditional education’ is a misnomer, a misapprehending of the kinds of practice in which the life of the community, up until the last third of the nineteenth century, was lived. It is to take a dominant practice of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, and project it back onto a world in which it did not exist, resulting in unhelpful observations about the limited nature of its ‘curriculum’ and the absence there of order and discipline. The introduction of classrooms, desks and discipline was not the reform of so-called traditional schooling. The innovations appeared suddenly, when the new techniques of order made suddenly obvious the need for such ‘structure’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 296

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s genealogy of discipline and the school as a modern institution, and to the broader theme of ‘order’ Mitchell is building across this book. — connects to: Early nineteenth-century lawyers trained by apprenticeship, not formal schooling — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 1261
• DEFINE: Clarifies that calling al-Azhar ‘traditional education’ is a category error - the concept of education as a separate process did not exist.