As colonial educator Arthur Mayhew disingenuously articulated, there were fundamental contradictions and ambiguities inherent in civic education in the context of colonial trusteeship. He noted that colonial education departments, including the Mandates, were unclear as to if their pupils were to become leaders of their own nations, and when. (Mayhew 1938, p 41) The process of implementing government funded systems of education occurred simultaneously with the troubled formation of the polities themselves, bringing conflicting ideals of identity into the classrooms, particularly in the Mandates for Mesopotamia(Iraq) and Palestine. The system of schools the Mandatory authorities sponsored was designed to function like those of the British colonies: to produce a limited, elite class of petty civil servants as well as a contented, rural class of tribesmen, mothers and farmers. These Government Schools, which provided education for Arab boys and girls, were controlled by Departments of Education under the auspices of British-run administrations. Although British civil servants generally occupied the upper echelons of the educational bureaucracy, staff, administrators, teachers and students were overwhelmingly Arabs, creating dueling notions of educational policy as well as the type of citizen the schools would graduate. Accounts of education in the Mandate for Mesopotamia overwhelmingly focus on the dialectic between secular and sectarian notions of citizenship. In contrast, histories of education in the Mandate for Palestine focus less on religious affiliation and more on the repression or promotion of Palestinian nationality. Yet both populations experienced British rule, shared legacies of Ottoman reforms and possessed significant religious, socioeconomic and political diversity. This paper will compare and contrast conceptions of citizenship and national affiliation by employing a close reading of government-produced documents, such as syllabi, reports, and government gazettes, as well as counter-narratives seen in banned textbooks,memoirs, letters, newspapers and diaries. By comparing Iraq and Palestine from 1920-1932 my project will explore the regional context of citizenship without a narrow focus on either a solely Palestinian or Iraqi identity, allowing for continuity between Ottoman and Mandate methods of education. My paper will seek to answer the following questions: what type of citizen were the Government Schools of the Mandates intended to produce? What government were they to accept and what nation were they to belong to? How did the experience of government education shape the types of citizenship which eventually became most resonant for the inhabitants of the region?