Primary education is free and compulsory for all children between the ages of 6 and 15. The French colonial education imposed on Algeria was designed primarily to meet the needs of the European population and to continue the European cultural pattern. A large majority of the students were children of the colonists. French was the language of instruction, and Arabic, when taught, was offered as an optional foreign language.

Isolated schooling of French and Algerian children was abolished in 1949, and increases in Muslim enrollments were scheduled in the comprehensive 1954 Constantine Plan to improve Muslim living conditions. On the eve of freedom, the European-oriented curricula were still taught exclusively in French, and less than 1/3 of school-age Muslim children were listed in schools at the primary level. At the secondary and university levels, only 31% and 11% of the students, respectively, were Algerians.

At the beginning of the 1963 school year, the education system was in complete disorder, and enrollments in schools at all levels totaled only 850,500. In the years immediately following, teachers were trained hastily or recruited abroad; classrooms were improvised, many in the vacated homes of former French residents. Attendance climbed to 1.4 million in 1966, to nearly 3.1 million by 1976, and to 6.6 million in 1992. The higher education system first adopted by the University of Algiers was based on the French model. As such, it stressed autonomy of the university faculties not only in administration but also in designing curricula and organizing courses of study aimed at particular degrees.