The early twentieth century in Egypt brought a florescence of discussion about what education was for and who should do it. While the British colonial government limited support for mass education, writers from across the political spectrum wrote books and articles arguing for the need to cultivate and educate the people towards a variety of ends. These ends ran the gamut from the maintenance of a hierarchical social order to the production of free and autonomous men equipped to govern themselves. All of these visions of what education should accomplish, however, had to contend with a powerful gendered model that had risen to prominence in the preceding decades: the idea that women, particularly mothers, were responsible for the essential work of moral cultivation in early childhood, whereas men—be they fathers, bureaucrats, or schoolteachers—should oversee the formal book-learning prescribed for the adolescent years. This paper draws on debates in the Egyptian periodical press as well as key texts in the history of pedagogical thought in Egypt to explore a rising tension between the role of the home and the mother in educating children, and the role of the school and the state. It focuses on the work of fiery anti-colonial thinker and government educational inspector ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Jawish to trace the rise of an argument that the state should take over the work of moral cultivation that had for decades been tied to the unique capacities of mothers in the home. Jawish’s 1903 text, Resources for Educators: New Methods in Tarbiya and Ta?lim (Ghunyat al-Mu?addibin: al-Turuq al-Haditha lil-Tarbiya wa al-Ta?lim), revealed a deep suspicion of the new powers being attributed to feminized domestic spaces and practices, which were ungovernable by the state’s male agents. With women out of the picture as educators for a Muslim future, Jawish’s vision of the educator state had to fill spaces that had been defined around women’s unique maternal capacities. The state, then, had to show that it too could mother: its schoolteachers could nurture children with love and affection, invoke joy and pleasure, and demonstrate a moral perfection worthy of emulation, all while teaching children the skills they needed to know. While Jawish was opposed by contemporaries like Rashid Rida, who counselled against state intervention in education in the name of “upbringing-towards-independence” (tarbiya istiql?liyya), Jawish’s vision of the state as educator and moral cultivator had lasting appeal through the interwar period and beyond.