The concept of education replaced ‘discipline’ and ‘organisation’ in Egyptian vocabulary.

Evidence

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: The etymology of tarbiya from ‘breeding’ to ‘education’ parallels the English word’s own history.