The systematic neglect of education for Algerians has long been recognised as one of the hallmarks of French colonial rule in the Maghrib, with profound implications for the social and political history of the country into the late twentieth century. Its effects were among the principal grievances of nationalist politics and its attenuation became one of the first priorities of the independent Algerian state. Influenced by later nationalist depictions of deliberate ‘depersonalisation’ and the sometimes exaggerated role claimed for the free schools of the reformist ?ulam?, scholarship has sometimes suggested that the social as well as the political history of colonial education is merely one of deprivation and ‘deculturation’. At the same time, however, most Algerians who were literate at independence, including of course the leaders of the revolution, were literate primarily in French, and increasingly towards the end of the colonial period, the provision and reform of education was a frequent concern of the colonial government. This paper seeks to illustrate the less well-known dimensions of the issue of state colonial schooling in Algeria, from c.1850 to c.1950, with a sidelong comparative glance towards the end of the period at developments in Tunisia and Morocco. Drawing on the colonial archives, the paper will show how discourses of reform, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, sought to grapple with the conflicting imperatives of colonial government through the conception and management of institutions of ‘practical education’, from high-level judicial training for ‘official’, salaried functionaries in the Islamic branch of the civil courts to vocational education for rural boys destined to become low-wage workers in the colonial economy. Repeated programs to ‘reform’ the system, in 1908, the 1930s, the mid-1940s, and during the war of independence, illustrate the intractable bind into which colonial administrators worked themselves and their ostensibly humanitarian purposes, and the confinement into which, more by force of circumstance than by design, they pushed generations of young Algerians. The private papers of the distinguished historian and university professor (and founding member of MESA), Roger Le Tourneaux (1907-71), who taught in Fez and Algiers and was consulted by the colonial state in the 1940s and 1950s, demonstrate vividly how, at the very end of the colonial system, it remained possible for high-minded educationalists to review the catastrophic past century as one of success for a French oeuvre de scolarisation in the Maghrib.