This article explores the crossover between the history of education and the history of childhood. The emergence of state-sponsored national schooling, institutions for juvenile delinquents, home-schooling and expanding higher education were legal and social manifestations of cultural assumptions concerning the needs of children and projections of futurity that accompanied childhood. Several avenues ripe for collaboration between historians of childhood and education are proposed, including a move towards transnational and globalised history, a renewed attention to socialisation and a return to the school as a source for children's writing and activities. In doing so it can be seen how educational practices and pedagogical beliefs regarding the nature of children reveal the underlying logic that governs modern categories of belonging and difference particularly in reference to the British and Ottoman empires.