In the aftermath of the 1948 war, and the dispossession of the majority of Palestinian refugees into Jordanian territory, a massive educational infrastructure was developed to accommodate the needs of refugee students. This educational system provided the newly-expanded Hashemite regime with a tool by which they hoped to reproduce and consolidate a state narrative that could de-nationalise Palestinian youth, and implicate them into Hashemite legitimacy. Through curricular and instructional alterations and interventions, an impenetrable school inspection and surveillance system, and the cooperation of international donors and organisations, the Jordanian regime endeavoured to contain the potency of pedagogical space for its own ends. Concomitantly, however, Palestinians too came to regard education as a vehicle for mobility and security in precarious times. By the late 1960s, education was being touted in glossy UN public relations material as a marker of Palestinian ‘success’ in exile. This paper zooms in on the everyday workings of schooling in the refugee camps in Jordan at a moment of particularly heightened popular mobilization in the Kingdom, and education’s role in transforming the political-economic and social capital of refugees. It will unpack the ways in which education came to be understood, framed, and enacted as a potentially liberatory exercise. In doing so, it attends to the ways in which interior debates on curriculum, pedagogical practices, educational built environments, all came to embody the high stakes of representational power and decolonial possibility. Weaving these debates and practices by students and teachers with those of UN and government bureaucrats, development interlocutors, and intelligence officials and inspectors, however, aims against nationalist teleology and triumphalism by grounding Palestinian educational history in the sometimes contradictory stakes of liberatory potential and social aspiration and class mobility. Through the use of UN and government archives, memoirs, oral histories, lesson planners, curriculum guides, statistical datasets, debates in party newspapers, and intelligence reports and files, this paper asks, what precisely did education do, and what was done with it?