The French conquest and colonization of Algeria began in 1830. By the mid-1830s there were already several French schools, and Pierre Genty de Bussy, the most important government representative in Algiers in those early years, could write: ‘Appelée au beau rôle de coloniser une des régences barbaresques, la France a pris pour auxiliaire de sa marche le plus puissant moyen de civilisation, l’instruction’ (‘Called to the fine work of colonizing one of the Barbary kingdoms, France has taken as an aid in her duties the most powerful means of civilization: education’). If, from a ‘postcolonial’ perspective, that statement appears archaic, it is for more than one reason. Few people today can think of the project of colonization as a beau rôle, or a ‘noble mission’ (another of Genty de Bussy's phrases); the idea of ‘civilization’ now arouses a great deal of suspicion; and the cheerful alliance of colonialism and education in Genty de Bussy's rhetoric, which we have come to understand as characteristic of the mission civilisatrice, is alien to most modern teachers’ conception of their work. (As noted in the Introduction, who ‘we’ are in all this is one of the questions I am hoping my material will raise.)

The fact that colonial Algeria's pre-eminent lycée came to be called the Lycée Bugeaud is evocative of all that now appears most reprehensible about colonial educational history.

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.

French schools in colonial Algeria were bound to be a focus for ‘native’ families’ anxieties about the prospect of déracinement, especially when their contact with French culture and French or European people was otherwise very limited. What is more, those anxieties were well-founded, at least in important respects, as we have seen; numerous authors described the increasing sense of alienation from their family backgrounds as their education progressed. In that context too, the republican principle of laïcité – French, alien and inconsistently applied though allegedly neutral in respect of different religions – looked, from some angles, like part of the problem, whatever its potential to provide a framework for schools’ negotiation of cultural/religious differences.

Nevertheless, in Djebar's story about the refectory we also saw a form of cultural confrontation and disorientation that was more positive, at least in some ways. Extra-curricular and curricular factors, including the opportunity to study French revolutionary history and to hear French revolutionary rhetoric, emboldened the students to dip their toes into the world of political resistance – if only, at that stage, to express dissatisfaction about what they, as ‘Muslims’, were served for lunch. They had some consciousness of, but not necessarily any sense of irony about, the inspiration they took from their French history lessons. And while there was no sign that the notion of laïcité was deliberately brought into play by the young Djebar or her fellow protestors, it was clear that for the adult author/narrator that notion and its peculiar colonial trajectory were part of the story. At some point Djebar was introduced to laïcité as an abstract concept as well as an inconsistent practice, and decided she could use it both to challenge the prejudices and inconsistencies harboured in her school and to question aspects of the culture intowhich she had been born.

This book had several starting points. One was my longstanding interest in literature's relationship to history and politics: its peculiar forms of reference, and also its impact on its readers, its ways of working on the worlds from which, and into which, it emerged. I read Said's Orientalism in the 1980s when I was first thinking about those questions. I agreed with a lot of what he said and admired his sense of political purpose, but started to wonder whether his uses of literature, and of the techniques of literary criticism, truly fitted together with his discussions of politics – including, fundamentally, speculations on texts’ political and ethical effects. (I was in this territory in Chapter 1.) As I continued reading other critics and theorists, that sense of a mismatch proved not to be unusual. It struck me that certain groups of people who seemed to need a reliable account of how literary texts and films worked in the world did not always have one. Postcolonial critics, linked in this way to other critics with an interest in ideology, were one example I explored; censors were another. It also struck me that critics, like censors, can find themselves in a paradoxical position.

The work of ‘instituteurs du bled’ during the colonial era – that is, primary school teachers working in remote rural locations, often on their own – has gathered a mythic aura in certain strands of French culture. That aura swirls around Albert Camus's story ‘L’Hôte’ of 1957: its central figure is a teacher, Daru, ‘qui vivait presque en moine’ in an ‘école perdue, content d’ailleurs du peu qu’il avait’ (83, ‘living almost like a monk in his remote schoolhouse […] content with the little he had’, 44). He is dedicated to his work and apparently respected by his pupils. The story of Jean Simonet, the teacher I quoted in the last chapter when discussing ‘adaptation’, also corresponds to the most positive, even heroic version of the myth, at least to start with: he recalled that the mountain village of Ait Aicha where he was given his first post after finishing at Bouzaréah did not appear on any of the maps he consulted, so he simply set off for roughly the right region, then asked around until someone could give him directions. On the last leg of his journey he was met by a mule train organized by the villagers, who somehow knew he was coming, and were pleased to see him arrive. This was in 1954; they had been petitioning for a school since 1938, and it had eventually been built in 1952. For Simonet the village was a very unfamiliar environment, far from anyone he knew, so from time to time he would travel to the town of Azazga to seek European company. Once he was invited by a French administrator to stay overnight on a Sunday to play bridge, but he declined, saying he should get back to the village to be ready for his pupils in the morning.

Half a century ago George Steiner wrote an essay about a sense of crisis in the humanities. Its title, ‘To Civilize our Gentlemen’, conjured up Victorian educational values that seem even more antiquated now than they did when the essay was published. Eminent Victorian educationalists such as Matthew Arnold talked ‘without embarrassment’ about ‘civilizing the nation’, as Helen Small notes in her 2013 book The Value of the Humanities. To most people working in education today their attitudes, not least towards ‘civilization’, surely feel quite distant. The French notion of the ‘mission civilisatrice’, evoked in the title of my book, is likely to appear even more remote, and worse: a complacent mix of religiosity and ethnocentricity, embroiled in a shameful colonial history where the malignant rhetoric of the white man's burden served as the pretext for violent conquest.

According to Steiner's essay, the study of English literature as an academic discipline in universities rested historically on three sets of ideas. First were particular notions of national identity, and particular forms of nationalism, which developed and came to the fore in the high colonial era. Second were assumptions about the foundational value, and the ready accessibility to the educated, of classical languages and cultures, which were further assumed to underpin the superiority of ‘Western’ culture over other cultures. Finally, and relatedly, there was a deep faith in the humanizing capacities of Western high culture.

As Steiner suggested, by the mid-1960s all three of these elements had been challenged quite fundamentally, above all in the wake of the traumas and inhumanities of colonialism, the Second World War, and decolonization. Many of the challenges had come, and continued to come in the years after Steiner wrote his essay, from politically radical sources, including feminism and anti-colonialism, whose basic tenets I and many other academics in the humanities now accept without hesitation; and they had an effect on the shape of the humanities, including the way literature is taught, what literature is taught, and what is taught alongside or instead of literature. If the cultural shift described by Steiner implied a certain loss of cultural and intellectual confidence, that loss of confidence seems salutary in the context of a history of imperialism, patriarchy, eurocentricity, and other salient characteristics of ‘Western’ cultures.

In the Preface to Out of Place Edward Said implied that he had been surprised when, looking back at what he had written, he realized how prominently his school years featured in the book. For reasons I touched on in the Introduction, his reaction may itself be surprising to some readers: many people think of their time at school as formative, and in Said's case it led to a life-long commitment to education. Yet the perplexity he felt over education's place in his memoir seems consistent with the uneasy status of education in his most influential critical works, where it receives little explicit attention – however deeply implicated and present it may be in other ways – and where the attention it does receive is frequently, and sometimes ferociously, antipathetic.

Much of the antipathy is grounded, of course, in Said's understanding of colonial education's place in colonialism. In his view, to borrow a summary from two of the many people working in his wake,

What is more, Said understood the complicity between education and imperialism to extend into the present, long after the major European empires started to crumble. In ‘Orientalism Now’ (the last chapter of the original text of 1978), he wrote: