What to choose? Going to the hills, to the fields, or to school? Built on the indecision of Pilar, Machado’s main character in Conto de Escola, we intend to analyze in this work how could a boy be turned into a student, and thereafter into a citizen, at the time of the Brazilian Empire. Our analysis encompasses mainly the institutional space of the model school known as Colégio Pedro II, between 1837, the date of its creation, and 1861, when it underwent through an intense reform. Our intention is to identify how sociability forms enacted by the school favored the reproduction of an ideal of a civilized society which belonged to the better sort, or the so-called: boa sociedade in the Empire. This ideal could only materialize through the instruction and the education efforts - which were hierarchically different in several ways - bestowed upon the members of the Brazilian nation. Once identified who would become the citizens of the Empire, and once defined the appropriate instruments for the reproduction of a national ideal, Colégio Pedro II played a mostly fundamental role in the State – and Nation-building project developed at the Court, in the capital city of the tropical Empire. While bearing these ideas in mind, we intend to demonstrate with this work, through the analysis of important aspects of the formal and symbolic school routine, how Colégio Pedro II was already considered at the time as a key tool for the reproduction and consolidation of a sought-for national image for the Brazilian Empire.