Schooling and the Colonial Project

Timothy Mitchell, in his fascinating book Colonising Egypt, has described schooling in nineteenth-century Egypt as the basis of “the new politics of the modern state,” ^[3] which took hold, after an extended infancy, in the late 1860s during the reign of Khedive Isma‘il. Even before formal European control was established over the country in 1876, Egyptian intellectuals educated abroad began to imagine schooling as a means of producing model citizens and a model society. “The power of working upon the individual offered by modern schooling,” Mitchell writes, “was to be the hallmark and method of politics itself,” a politics “modelled on the process of schooling,” ^[4] which would utilize the school's “precise methods of inspection, coordination and control” to “change the tastes and habits of an entire people…and by a new means of education make him or her into a modern political subject—frugal, innocent, and, above all, busy.” ^[5] Inspired by Foucault's reading of disciplinary formation in Europe, Mitchell portrays the sea change in Egyptian politics as a process of

replacing a power concentrated in personal command, and always liable to diminish, with powers that were systematically and uniformly diffused. The diffusion of control required mechanisms that were measured rather than excessive and continuous rather than sporadic, working by invigilation and the management of space.^[6]

In a sense the present chapter can be read as a documentary supplement to Mitchell's description of the establishment of European-style schools in Egypt, focusing much more specifically on their use as arenas of religious instruction, and concentrating on the detailed strategies of imperial administrators. But at the same time, I will argue that we need to go considerably beyond Mitchell's reading of Egyptian history in order to understand the unique dynamic of the school. While the school may be a mechanism of diffuse and invisible power, it is also—as we saw in chapter 1—an engine of tension and contradiction. As sociologists of education have shown us, students are neither the passive pawns of educational organization and ideology, nor are educators their absolute masters. The belief held by cultural elites that “modern” education is the most effective machine of social pacification has acted to stunt their own recognition of its ambiguous and unpredictable influence.