One of the abiding themes in Palestinian communities is education as success story: success of self, success of family, and success of nation. This paper seeks to unravel this trope, detail its origins, its logics and the consequences of that logic in Palestinian political and social life in the aftermath of the 1948 war. Reading policy papers and analysis produced by the PLO and its political parties, the UN and the various organisations laying claim to humanitarian support for Palestinians, including but not only UNRWA, from 1948 to 1993, and memoirs and oral histories of teachers, students, bureaucrats and policy makers from Palestinian communities across the Arab world, I explore how multiple figures at several social scales formed, framed, and materialised this trope to build the scaffolding for shared ideas of Palestinian self and state.  Education did not only marshall international resources for humanitarian purposes, but directly worked to reconfigure Palestinian social and political aims. It ranked choice and trajectory for labour export, prepared Palestinian young people for hierarchies of class mobility, and established new genderings of labour life. It built conditions for political voices and re-imagined lives - women as carers and providers, social relations built on remittance and alienation, extraction and rebellion. This is an essay that seeks to wrestle education from a nationalist and analytically reductionist narrative that renders education as a mere handmaiden to a de-textured and de-classed Palestinian historiography. It hopes to offer a way through which to understand precisely why and how education came to be the central crucible, in both surprising and not so surprising ways, of Palestinian social transformation in the aftermath of expulsion.