Schooling as an autonomous age-based institution is a recent European colonial invention

Evidence

Learning was now to be separated from the practices in which it was entwined, assigning it a distinct place, the school, and a distinct period of life, that of youth. ‘L’instruction publique’ (al-tarbiya al-umumiyya in Arabic) was the novel phrase for this practice. It referred, it was said, to ‘that which is studied by boys and girls in schools and colleges and in all establishments where a specific number of people are brought together for instruction’. Schooling was to be an autonomous field, defined not by its subject or method, but as an activity that took place in a specialised location, among a specific group of people of a particular age. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 301

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the novel nineteenth-century concept of ‘l’instruction publique’ — schooling redefined by location and age-group rather than by subject or method.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s discipline/age-cohort analysis and to modern critiques of ‘schooling’ as an institutional construction rather than a natural activity. — connects to: The child-adult analogy framed colonial rule as pedagogical through the 1940s. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 244