In order to provide emergency relief and assistance to Palestinian refugees after the 1948 war, the United Nations established the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)in late 1949. As months of dispossession and displacement turned to years, UNRWA, in partnership with Unesco, quickly established basic schooling for refugee youth by late 1950. This educational system, growing quickly, was not autonomous, and was bound by the political priorities set forth by donors and powers dictating their parameters at the UN General Assembly, as well as the host state of Jordan (and its British overseers)—which had just annexed the West Bank in 1950, and hosted the majority of the Palestinian refugees. This paper explores the first decade of schooling in the camps, and majority Palestinian government schools, and in particular the technologies for socialization de-nationalization, and surveillance set in place to curtail the political mobilization of the refugees. As the region’s first extensive experiment in “knowledge economy,” this paper asks, what were these technologies, how did they facilitate this experiment, and how did they support UNRWA's broader early aim for re-settlement? Fearful of the increasing politicization of the refugees, and in particular their challenge to Jordanian political legitimacy and claims of refugee representation, the Jordanian regime, in the interest of state stability and fortification, compounded UNRWA’s own priorities with curricular and inspection mechanisms of their own. What tools did the Jordanians use, and how did they attempt to achieve the aim of upending nationalist refugee youth mobilization? With UNRWA/Unesco archival material, documents and reports, memoirs of teachers, inspectors, and students, interviews and press articles by UNRWA and Jordanian Ministry of Education curriculum developers, and textbooks from 1949 to 1958, I draw out the logic(s) and ramifications of UNRWA and Jordan’s educational regime for refugees. I attempt to make sense of the ways in which schools have and continue to act as spaces of contention and experimentation, and draw out the complex interplay between the needs of UN agencies and host states, and the demands of refugee agency, within the structural imperatives of refugee containment and de-mobilization.