Abstract This article addresses the colonial project of “civilizing” and educating indigenous people in the farthest corners of the Dutch empire – South Dutch New Guinea (1902–1942), exploring the entanglement between colonial education practice and the civilizing mission, unravelling the variety of actors in colonial education in South Dutch New Guinea. Focusing on practice, I highlight that colonial education invested heavily in disciplining the bodies, minds, and beliefs of indigenous peoples to align them with Western Catholic standards. This observation links projects to educating and disciplining indigenous youth to the consolidation of colonial power. Central to these intense colonial interventions in the lives of Papuans were institutions of colonial education, managed by the Catholic mission but run by non-European teachers recruited from elsewhere in the Dutch colony. Their importance as proponents of the “civilizing mission” is largely unappreciated in the historiography of missionary work on Papua.