The question of what it meant to raise and educate a child became the subject of sustained debate among Arab intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their discussions revolved around the concept of tarbiya, an old Arabic term for raising livestock that began, in the nineteenth century, to refer to new structures of formal schooling, new pedagogies, and to the female labor of childrearing, moral cultivation, and subject formation in the home. Through debates about tarbiya, questions about the proper heat of a baby's bathwater or how to teach a child not to lie were linked to concerns about how to produce moral and pious individuals, educated communities who could exploit new markets for goods and employment, and an Arab world capable of “progress” and “development” in the face of European colonialism, economic penetration, and rapid technological change. Scholars like Tim Mitchell (1988) and Brinkley Messick (1992) have argued that educational thought and practice underwent an epistemic transformation in the nineteenth century, as new forms of standardization, order, and surveillance altered both how pedagogy was theorized and how children were trained. This paper traces the concept of tarbiya as pedagogical thought in Beirut and Cairo from 1850 to 1911 to rethink this period as one of educational "rupture." What exactly was transformed, and what remained? I examine works on or about tarbiya by American and Syrian Protestants in Beirut (Henry Harris Jessup and the Syrian Evangelical Church), Christian writers in the Arabic press (Labiba Hashim), and Muslim reformers (Abd al-Qadir al-Qabbani and Mohammed Abduh) to question what was new about pedagogical thought in the late nineteenth century. I also explore the claims these thinkers made about the "newness" of their ideas. Ultimately, I argue that while tarbiya did take on new meanings in the nineteenth century, the practices, concerns, and forms of social life and individual development it authorized retained important connections to older traditions of moral cultivation, subject formation, and education among Christians and Muslims alike. What's more, I show that the idea that education in the Arab world underwent a fundamental transformation in the nineteenth century echoes a central claim made by theorists of tarbiya at the turn of the century, many of whom advocated for their proposed practices and pedagogies by depicting them as a fundamental break from an imagined, ignorant, "pre-modern" past.