In earlier chapters we saw that formal education in colonial Algeria was highly varied in nature: academic and practical, secular (or secularish) and religious, Christian and Islamic, ‘adapted’ to native children or not, ‘integrated’ to some degree across the colonizer/ colonized division, or not. We have seen that some historians, with illiteracy statistics to hand, have emphasized that there just wasn't that much formal education in colonial Algeria for the colonized, especially not ‘French’ education, contrary to what the rhetoric of the mission civilisatrice might have implied. And we have also seen something of the diversity of colonial-era perspectives on colonial education, especially among policy makers and educationalists: a diversity also evident, as will become clearer in this chapter, among the families to whom colonial education was offered.

All of this suggests that the place of education in colonialism is misunderstood if one assumes that colonial education simply worked as a tool of colonialism, even if that was part of the story. Evidently some proponents of colonialism saw education as a way of establishing and maintaining French colonial domination, as did some opponents of colonialism, but many pro-colonial voices, from the beginning of colonization to the end, expressed anxiety about the risks that education posed to colonialism. Part of the interest of Feraoun in that historical and intellectual context is that a single figure, as diffracted through his writing in various genres, could pass through and express such divergent attitudes: an ‘assimilated’ mentality, including enthusiasm for assimilation; persistent attachment to, and active promotion of, Kabyle culture; a fierce desire for national independence that did not dispel, and was not undermined by, some lucid anxieties about what independence would bring; and a powerful sense that his time in French schools had brought him both losses and gains.