This paper examines memoirs from British officials and local Arab educators, colonial records, and secondary material on late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine and places them in dialogue with each other by engaging theories of translating modernity and examining continuities from the late Ottoman period into British colonial educational policies. I will analyze, first, the driving educational philosophies of British officials and Arab educators during the British Mandate (1922-1948) and, second, how the project of controlling education was entertained with the looming political question of the future of Palestine. Competing educational projects were a prominent aspect of broader debates over the future of former Ottoman colonies following World War One. The 1919 Covenant of the League of Nations, the legal document granting the British Empire tutelage of Palestine, asserted Ottoman failure to achieve modern standards of civilization. This framework also justified the British political presence by presenting the former Ottoman territories, such as Palestine, as inherently lagging in their progress towards civilization and called for British promotion of social and cultural development. Changes in education intended to fundamentally alter Palestinian society became central in terms of internal governance as well as a means to justify Britain’s presence to the international community. The literature from this period has overwhelmingly presented Arab resistance to British colonial rule as a nationalist movement dominated by the drive for Arab unity in the face of European imperialism and Zionist migration. Yet several factors in this period suggest that other forms of resistance to empire operated outside the nationalist narrative. For example, the spread of literacy and education among subaltern populations and the residual effects of Ottoman unity among elites present a diverse set of experiences of Mandatory Palestine, as well as different aims and outcomes for education. A frequent criticism of examining education reforms as a transformative process in the modern Middle East asserts that most education projects primarily, if not exclusively, targeted elites. Yet government officials and education reformers justified the use of precious funding and other resources for pedagogical projects on account of a shared belief that education would develop the general population—especially groups like women or rural populations— that they perceived as non-modern or regressive. This paper explores the ways in which such elite officials imagined their education projects as impacting the self-image and development of subaltern communities, as well as how individuals in these communities conceptualized the role of education in their lives.