In 1935, the Government of Palestine opened a new reformatory institution for delinquent boys on the Government Farm in Acre, where they were trained in “all branches of practical farming.” The aims of this curriculum were three-fold: to give the boys tangible skills that would translate into stable employment upon their release, to provide labor for the government, and, in the words of the Government Welfare Inspector, for the boys to act as vectors to “spread better methods of agriculture throughout the country.” In the same year that the new reformatory school opened in Acre, the Government Welfare Inspector extolled the virtues of practical training for the inmates at the Girls Reformatory Home in Jerusalem. In learning cooking, breadmaking, washing, ironing, and handicrafts, she claimed, no girl left the reformatory without “work being found for her or – best of all – a suitable marriage being arranged for her.” This paper examines the uses, experiences, and consequences of practical education in the reformatory institutions of Mandate Palestine from 1919 to 1948. It argues that the differing structures of education for male and female juvenile delinquents - agricultural and trades-based training for boys and the domestic and handicrafts education for girls - sought to create a stabilized colonial society along gendered lines. Using records of the Government of Palestine, as well as those of humanitarian and welfare non-governmental organizations and actors, this paper shows how rehabilitative education of so-called "young offenders" was part of a larger project of social ordering in Palestine following the First World War. Colonial educators, both within the government and in the larger constellation of social welfare actors, understood practical education not only as a way of transforming wayward youth into productive colonial subjects, but also as a means for redeeming Palestinian society as a whole. At the same time, by reading against the colonial archive, this paper reveals the daily violence entrenched in these reformatory institutions as well as the mundane and spectacular ways that the young people within them resisted the agendas of rehabilitative education.