The economic and environmental significance of school land policy in the United States has yet to be imagined, let alone systematically studied, by scholars. Although the fact that Congress allocated shares of public lands to the support of schools beginning in the 1780s is well known, historians have not adequately assessed the impacts of that policy. No one has seriously posed the question of how such policies figured in the history of resource extraction, capital accumulation, and economic development. What difference did it make that federal policy tied school funding to the sale of billions of acres of public land or to the direct lease of such lands to timber, mining, and livestock interests--historical arrangements that survive today through much of the U.S. West? Drawing on state-by-state accounts of the terms of school land disposition and the record of Congressional debates over school land policies, this article advances an argument about the relationship between nature, education, and political economies of U.S. state formation, laying the groundwork for assessing more fully the consequences of that relationship.