This paper examines the history of primary education in Suez in the late nineteenth century within the broader context of schooling in Egypt. I focus on the case of the Italian primary school in Suez, attended by Egyptian and Italian students, as well as pupils of other foreign nationalities, and compare it to those of Zagazig in the Delta, and of Alexandria. In doing so, I aim to account for the local specificities of educational institutions in the Suez area, while simultaneously locating it within broader regional trends that both connected it and distinguished it from schools in other Egyptian industrial and urban locales. Education, I maintain, offers a unique entry point to account for the different modes of interaction and tension between local and foreign communities in Egypt at the turn of the century, as dependent on their geographical location, the longer histories of these locales, and their role within the broader context of political and cultural relations across the Mediterranean. Drawing on consular archives and correspondence, statistic records, and Arabic and foreign press, I examine how practical, pedagogical, and political exigencies shaped the life of the students of the schools. On the one hand, I detail how daily life in the schools unfolded, and the rationale behind their specific pedagogical choices. I look at the organization of the classes, and how schooling and social provision varied due to the communities’ different socioeconomic standing – for example, for the families of “sailors and factory workers” in Suez, of blue collars in Zagazig, and those more affluent of Alexandria. On the other hand, I document key differences in the schools’ curricula, and specifically with respect to language education – such as the importance given in Alexandrian schools to education in French and English, rather than to Arabic in Suez and Zagazig – and in the different ratio of Egyptian and foreign pupils within their student bodies. Ultimately, by looking at the history of these communities through the prism of education, my paper aims to uncover the multiple experiences and multidirectional modes of interaction, privilege, and economic and cultural discrimination experienced by Egyptian and foreign children, along with their families and local communities. I thus seek to position the case of Suez locally and within broader regional realities of ideological promotion, overlapping political sovereignties, and social and legal hierarchies, as these were crystallized in the case of primary education.