Le système d’enseignement algérien, entre passé et présent

The functioning of the Algerian educational system today cannot be understood without taking into account its most distant history and especially the effects of the imposition of the French system during the colonial period. It is indeed less in the numerical weight of the local populations that have been taken over by the French system than in the process of its institutionalization, that the impact of the French school in Algeria is best captured. The history of this imposition was that of a contradictory process of adaptation of the teaching to the specific mode of colonization – this adaptation having always oscillated between assimilationist inclinations and segregationist convictions; this is reflected in the continual search for a type of “apart” education that would have allowed both to control the "civil society" and to establish the conditions for not questioning the colonial model. The forms of the implementation process in this respect were many and varied. The national system of education set up with the independence was achieved, in a certain continuity of the French system until the decade 1970-80, at the same time as started a policy of voluntarist Arabization doubled by all-out schooling. Under the effect of rapid and sloppy massification and a policy of Arabization not at all rigorous – answering more to political vested interests than rationally thought and applied – the malfunctions that are emerging show the contradictions and the conflicts between the old and the new brought through the reforms that will take place from the mid-1970s to the years 2000. The issues of teaching languages, such as content and transmitted values, the place of religion, teacher training, pedagogy, will be subject to a more open conflict that is radicalized around the more general purposes and functions of the educational system. This translates into a certain anomie of the education system, which will be bypassed by certain social groups seeking other ways for their children, particularly in private education or in institutions dependent on foreign countries.