Studies of late Ottoman Macedonia typically highlight inter-communal violence and the extent to which nationalism was present or not amongst inhabitants, an approach Keith Brown terms “methodological nationalism”. Such a framework inevitably obscures the nuances of everyday life and glosses over the different socio-economic factors motivating the decision-making process. In this context, the Vlachs, a nomadic, Romance-speaking people of the Balkans, have been studied through the prism of their relationship to either Romania or Greece, with their educational movement, which first took off in the 1860s, inevitably linked to competing nationalist ideologies. This approach, which reads national consciousness onto educational choice, has frequently been used to demonstrate that the Vlachs were either Romanians or Greeks. This paper problematizes such interpretations, reframing the Vlach school movement within its broader Ottomans social context, and examining the relationship between school attendance and socio-economic status. It also explores the influence of Ottomanist ideas on the major figures driving the movement, and posits an intellectual connection between Vlach teachers and Ottoman imperial educational discourses. Ultimately, it argues that Vlach school attendance was linked to the promotion of personal and communal financial and cultural interests, rather than nationalistic ones. Born in Avdella, Grevena kaza, during the 1830s, Apostol Margarit, the founder of the Vlach school movement, began his work as a teacher in the 1860s and attempted to open his first school as early as 1862. British, Greek, and Romanian educational statistics indicate a rapidly growing number of Vlach schools, which multiplied throughout the 1870s and 1880s. A further examination of these figures reveals important information about the students themselves and indicates a socioeconomic divide between Vlachs in urban and rural areas, with the former choosing classical education in Greek lycées and the latter preferring the curricula of Vlach language schools, with their more technical focus on skills directly applicable to life in the countryside. After reviewing these statistics, this paper turns to Margarit’s treatise, titled Les Grecs, Les Valaques, Les Albanais, et L’Empire Ottoman, which makes an impassioned argument in favor of accepting the Ottoman Empire as a “tutor and a savior” whose imperial umbrella may serve as the protector of Vlach interests, enabling them to be educated in their native language and thus giving them the tools to become productive members of the society they inhabit.