Which came first, the school or the community? This paper explores the politics of community building through the lens of education in French mandate Lebanon. Historiography on education has by and large unquestioningly assumed that different ‘types’ of schooling served the needs of coherent, pre-extant communities, or what I reconceive of as “pedagogical constituencies.” During the late Ottoman period, American Protestant missionary, French Catholic, and local Muslim and Jewish communities, for example, all had schools in which knowledge specifically geared or tailored to that community was molded and imparted. However, this picture is complicated when we consider that, increasingly after 1905, new educational spaces--defined more by language of instruction and/or political leaning than religious affiliation--began to emerge, determining where students were enrolled. As such, this paper investigates, alongside newly minted “minority” communities, the formation of communities of knowledge within and among different schools. The production and circulation of particular forms of knowledge was instrumental in articulating a new kind of group identity. In so doing, this project asks: what is it about education that creates a particular community (or communities) of knowledge: is it the presence of formal educational institutions, or in the form and content of the knowledge itself? Further, where is the overlap between creating a community of knowledge versus a sectarian community? How does that overlap help us to reconsider the real or conceptual boundaries between classes and between religious communities during this period, and the implications for nation and state formation in Lebanon and elsewhere? In closing, I argue how the intersections of community, class, and education have both structured and contingently framed practices of citizenship during the mandate era.