Education has always played a peculiarly important role in French society and politics and it is not surprising that the establishment of an educational system in AOF preceded the final administrative organisation of the Federation itself. The various arrêtés of November 1903 provided a structured system of education, from the village schools at the bottom to the Ecole normale in St Louis at the top, with curriculum and personnel appropriate to each type of school. Until these reforms French education had been left to private, mainly missionary, initiative but the combined pressure of metropolitan secularisation laws and the growing realisation of the urgency of finding new alternatives to military conquest forced the colonial authorities to take a more active part in the education of its newly conquered subjects. The moral conquest of the Africans had explicit political and economic aims: Governor-General Clozel's preface to a book by Georges Hardy, the Inspector of Education in AOF, stated plainly that ‘the first requirement of the education which we give in our colonies should be one of practical utility, first of all for us and then for the natives’. In an earlier survey of the colony of Niger it was argued that ‘To instruct the natives is to augment their economic value’.

In no case was the political aspect of education reform more clear than in the question of Muslim education.