School placement was scaled to population in a hierarchy mapping the nation-state itself

Evidence

With the building of schools there are several other respects in which a new order was inscribed. First, the distribution of the schools themselves was made the deliberate expression of an administrative hierarchy, the hierarchical order of the new nation-state. The Commission on the Organisation of Knowledge (Qumisyun tanzim al-ma`arif) laid down in December 1881 that the elementary schools were to be classed in three ranks according to their required size, corresponding to the size of the village or town. Every village or group of hamlets with a population of 2,000 to 5,000 was to have a third-class elementary school (one teacher and forty pupils), every town or group of villages with a population of 5,000 to 10,000 was to have a second-class elementary school (two teachers and two classes), every large town was to have a first-class elementary school, every provincial capital was to have a secondary school, with one school per 10,000 inhabitants, and in the very centre of Cairo, in the new Bureau, were located the highest schools. The schools were precisely distributed by size and rank, as expressions of the correct ordering of the separate elements – individuals, villages, towns, and provincial and national capitals – in terms of which a nation-state could be conceived as an integrated and bounded totality. Thus it was claimed that the separate schoolrooms distributed all over the country, regulated by the ‘Organic Law’, would ‘form a whole by their coordination’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 270

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The schools are not merely education but a literal physical grid that makes the nation-state thinkable as a bounded totality - institutions as machines for producing the very category of the national collective.
• XREF: This is a concrete instance of Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ thesis and of the state writing itself onto territory - connects to Mitchell’s core argument about enframing/order.
• SEED: The idea of a school network scaled precisely to population as a physical representation of a nation-state is an angle for an essay on how infrastructure literally maps sovereignty onto land.