Mirza Hassan Tabrizi (later, Roshdiyeh) (1860-1944) was a Qajar-era Iranian intellectual, constitutional activist, and educational reformer. In English and Persian-language scholarship alike, the story of his new schools remains at the margins. My paper brings his educational activities to the center of investigation. Specifically, I take up a close reading of his previously unexamined diaries about his Ottoman travels, which were made available to me from a private family archive. Roshdiyeh had travelled to the Ottoman territories to learn about new “primary” educational models he had read about in Iranian newspapers. I argue, in context of secondary sources on Islamic, Ottoman, and Qajar education, that Roshdiyeh had a mixed perception on Ottoman pedagogy; he was disappointed with the schools of Istanbul and Cairo, but had found sound pedagogy at a French-instituted school in Beirut. There, he discovered and experimented with a new, phonetic method for teaching the Arabic alphabet, which, in contrast to the mak?tib of Tabriz, proved to generate efficient and effective literacy once he returned to teach in Iran. This paper presentation is part of a larger dissertation chapter on the life and activities of Mirza Hassan Roshdiyeh in context of modern Iranian intellectual history. I draw connections to my dissertation project in the course of my presentation.