Conditionalities are most broadly defined as the provisos that are to be met by a country when borrowing money from the International Financial Institutions (IFIs). Increasingly, they have proven to have far reaching consequences for countries entering into agreements with The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. These consequences are often mistakenly believed to be primarily financial. Instead, research that has started to address conditionalities suggests that the ramifications of accepting conditionalities have had profound consequences on education and learning. Given the impetus behind the development and propagation of these policies, this paper attempts to trace the effects of conditionalities on education. After tracing the history of the development of this specific policy tool, we argue that it is the complex mechanisms of debt inherent in policies of conditionality that have obscured the understanding of the connection between this form of social policy and education.