Foreign education had been recognized as an imperial power-knowledge network by the Ottoman state preceding the Turkish Republic. Control over education became a new terrain of struggle in the late 19th century, contemporaneous with increasing European intervention in the minority politics of the Ottoman Empire. I argue that with the rising importance of education, ‘ignorance,’ defined as a fount of corruption by the Ottoman state, was also discovered as a social and national problem. The period of educational transition from empire to nation-state in the late 19th and early 20th century proved formative for the post-Ottoman Turkish state’s approach to national education. In 1924, the newly established Turkish state banned religious education and moved to restrict foreign educational institutions. The contrast between the imperial and nation-state approach to education points to a tension that allows for a theorization of the relationship between education and sovereignty, while the fragmented and transnationally contested Ottoman field of education provides a unique vantage point to unpack how national educational fields form through contention. I challenge a linear, teleological, and nationally bound narrative of the formation of national education. Instead, I conceptualize the processes of de-transnationalizing (nationalizing) and de-religionizing (secularization) within the educational field as two separate but related processes, receiving their dynamism from the contention of various educational actors. I analyze the state’s relationship with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. I use American institutions as a proxy for foreign educational institutions for two pragmatic reasons; first, the ABCFM mostly operated in Asia Minor, which provides for territorial overlap with the Turkish Republic. Second, the Ottoman state singled out American institutions as hegemonic amongst others, hence they symbolize the perils of foreign education and contestation in the field of education writ large. I conceive of the Ottoman educational field not as a nationally bounded field, seeking the homogenization of its population, as the mainstream narrative of the construction of educational fields would indicate. Instead, I highlight how this educational field is nested within layered logics of imperial hierarchies, as the Ottoman state is cognizant of its own subordinated position within the global imperial system while at the same time it is exacerbating and constructing imperial hierarchies within its own territory. From this perspective, the ‘homogenization’ of populations become intimately connected to the global metanarrative of racial difference and inter-imperial power relations.