Historical scholarship on the Shiʿa of Lebanon has largely focused on the mandate period, the 1960s and 70s lead-up to the civil war, or the post-war period. This paper argues that the neglected early independence period (1943-1950s) featured important shifts in the way the Shiʿa of south Lebanon conceptualized their place in the Lebanese nation-state, both as members of a sect and as citizens of the state. Despite the official recognition of the Shi‘i sect in 1926, the vast majority of the Shi‘i population remained politically and economically marginalized for some time. Such marginalization was facilitated by the fact that the Shi‘a primarily resided in the country’s peripheral south. Featuring the largest illiteracy rate among the various sects, and the fewest schools serving its members, education was viewed as a key indication of the marginalization of the Shi‘a in Lebanon. However, and contrary to existing narratives, organized and institutional attempts to address their marginalization preceded the emergence of Musa al-Sadr and his associated social movement of the 1960s. This paper explores the context, motivations, practices, and assumptions concerning educational reform as a means of integrating the Shiʿa of south Lebanon into the broader national project during the early independence period. In particular, this paper narrates and analyzes the development of the Jaʿfariyya schools in Tyre. First created in 1938, the Jaʿfariyya school system had by 1948 established co-educational secondary schools that aimed to serve Shiʿi students throughout the south. Through a close reading of administrative and curriculum records drawn from the Jaʿfariyya archive, this paper locates the school system’s initiatives/reforms within a broader bottom-up effort to integrate the southern periphery into the new Lebanese nation-state. The stakes and effectiveness of these reforms were debated in the Shiʿi journal al-ʿIrfan. Thus this paper also examines the various education-related articles and editorials of al-ʿIrfan, including its republication of speeches by Jaʿfariyya administrators. Through examining the case of the Jaʿfariyya school, this paper sheds light on a hitherto understudied period in both the history of Lebanon and that of its Shi‘i community. It does so through examining bottom-up efforts at better integrating the periphery into the Lebanese nation-state, as both a form of identification as well as a set of institutional bureaucracies. In doing so, it challenges Beirut-centric narratives of educational development as well as Maronite-Sunni-centric histories of state formation.