ABSTRACT
A military purpose informed everything that Muhammad Ali introduced or reformed during the 40 years and more that he ruled Egypt. Even his schools were organized and administered as military training camps: the students strictly regimented, given military rank and pay, and gripped in perpetual fear of corporal punishment for the least infraction of the severe rules of discipline they lived under. Halfway through Muhammad Ali's reign, the few French advisors and military officers working for him at the time, jealous of the favored position of the Italians, were at last able to convince the ruler to turn to France to support his modernization programs. Only two secondary schools were founded, one in Cairo, the other in Alexandria, which gives an idea of the miniscule base of Muhammad Ali's educational reforms. By training students in a foreign language so they could take over from the Europeans in translating both books and lectures, the Language School served the School of Translation.
