One of the most important features of the rise of modern schooling in the Arab East was the separation of girls from boys in the classroom, a feature that often goes unremarked as a vestige of “traditional” forms of gender segregation in the region even though there was nothing traditional about these nineteenth-century schools. While working women toiled alongside men in the fields and the silk factories of Mt. Lebanon, women who passed through modern schools were introduced to a new regime of gendered labor, in which their unique task was increasingly to undertake tarbiya, the moral cultivation and proper raising of children in the home. For reformers across sect, this idea—that women were uniquely suited for tarbiya, but needed formal, institutional education to perfect it—became central to dreams of civilizational renewal based on motherhood and gender difference. This paper draws on the archives and pedagogical production of nineteenth century schools to investigate how efforts to institutionalize education in late nineteenth-century Beirut and Mount Lebanon shaped educational thought. Specifically, it shows how these efforts produced new ideals of masculinity and femininity, which served as the gendered grounds for visions for civilizational renewal taking shape in the Arab East. These ideals reflected the institutional priorities, pedagogical traditions, and multiple audiences brought together by new educational institutions. These institutions taught that educated women would raise sons and daughters to advance their communities towards a better future. Women, in turn, would be defined by their capacities to reproduce and nurture, and their sexuality would be firmly directed towards reproductive ends. This normative regime of gendered labor, however, did not simply travel through the ether. Rather, the new ideals of masculinity and femininity were forged in the classrooms of schools administered by missionaries and local reformers alike.