This research will explore the history of public school education in Nepal between the years 1900 and 1990. Given the dominance of the state-centric approach in the existing writings on the subject, we propose a different approach to this history. While the particular characteristics of the various political regimes and their policies for school education are important to our inquiry, our focus will be on the agency of common people who marshalled their ideas, energy and collective resources to start and run schools against great odds. We focus on individuals and collectives that made school education possible for members of various groups, communities, and solidarities that had hitherto little access to schools. Their work happened by negotiating the restricting dynamics of the various regimes and by taking risks that pushed the borders of the socially possible at any given moment of time. The outputs of this study will collectively constitute a solid contribution to our knowledge about public schooling in a country in the Global South that was a late starter when it comes to school education for the masses.