Modern Egyptian politics was first conceived as an extension of schooling

Evidence

The power of working upon the individual offered by modern schooling, as I suggested in the previous chapter, was to be the hallmark and the method of politics itself. Politics was a process to be conceived according to the same processes as schooling, and was to work in the same way upon both body and mind. This new notion of’politics’ appears in Egyptian writings from the 1860s, first of all as something to be taught and practised in the new schools, where it would provide what Rifa`a al-Tahtawi called ‘a general governing power’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 334