My contribution seeks to approach children as the writers of their own history. I foreground the concrete traces left by children in the historian’s archive to shed new light on how notions of political participation, authority, and communal organization evolved in the period of the British occupation of Egypt. I focus in particular on two sets of accounts produced by Italian and Egyptian children around the turn of the century, which shed light on how children navigated, espoused, and contested various forms of parental, communal, and state authority. The first set of documents I examine concerns a series of “troubling events” that took place at the beginning of the year 1902 in the Italian royal elementary school in Cairo. The Italian consul found out about the events from an anonymous letter, which prompted an investigation that came to involve various levels of the Italian colonial administration from Egypt to Rome. The reports include firsthand accounts of students in the school who were interrogated by the Italian inspector about the allegedly “dishonorable” behavior of one of their peers. In addition to offering a rare firsthand account of how children engaged with forms of disobedience and authority, these sources show how colonial authorities, concerned first and foremost with keeping the events quiet, regarded children as a vulnerable segment of society to be moralized and shielded from “dangerous” aspects of public life and, simultaneously, as the ultimate outward-looking mirror of their community. The second body of sources I discuss, in turn, was produced by Egyptian children enrolled in state schools across different Egyptian cities and consists mainly of petitions and public addresses on the occasion of school ceremonies. The young authors of these documents, I claim, embraced and mobilized a widespread rhetoric that regarded children as the “future of the country” in order to demand free access to instruction, lodging, and textbooks, or else assert the alignment of their desires with those of the state. They did so, crucially, by showcasing a specific kind of fluency and linguistic norms that they had acquired through elementary education, producing texts that differed stylistically from, for example, the petitions written by parents or groups of residents. Although seemingly “a-political,” I claim that these documents demonstrate that children were directly involved in shaping notions of authority, their position in society, and social participation; chiefly at a time in which direct political engagement was otherwise limited.