In Uganda, the implementation of universal primary education (UPE) in 1997 and universal secondary education (USE) in 2005 have led educational policy makers, teachers, parents, and students to seek creative solutions to the problem of ensuring educational quality as schools incorporate 4 million more students. Some Ugandans worry about overcrowded classrooms and express concern that the children of the poor, who cannot escape into the private school system, will be disadvantaged in the end by the short-term decline in outcomes that UPE must inevitably entail. As educators in Uganda search for strategies that will yield a high-quality education for all, it is instructive to look back to a time, early in the twentieth century, when Uganda had an educational system that provided rudimentary education to equal numbers of girls and boys, and large numbers of adults, but turned away from it. This article explores how the Phelps-Stokes Commissions' recommendations led to a turn away from literary education toward a focus on "adapted education," discusses the role of missionaries as the primary promoters of education in colonized Africa and their "selective lending" of nineteenth-century school practices, and tackles the application of the European and American ideas regarding education by missionaries, colonial policymakers, and a very small number of well-educated Africans. It discusses how Africans used indigenous practices of education to spread the skill of mother-tongue literacy: they did the adapting of what they already knew about education. (Contains 3 footnotes.)