Physical Address
Indirizzo: Via Mario Greco 60, Buttigliera Alta, 10090, Torino, Italy
In “Algeria 1962. A popular story” (La Découverte Éditions), the historian Malika Rahal underlines the place and the importance of the 1962-1963 school year in this movement towards the future. Selected pieces:
Continuation of retraining is one of the priorities of the new government invested in late September. While the State is now “restored in the fullness of its rights” and that “the building work will begin”, the list of emergencies includes, in addition to the organization of the start of the school year, the literacy of the masses, the recovery of security, the economic recovery, the reconversion of the army (…) forge a medical body requires the restart of the education system under the number of French officials and interrupted by the violence of the OAS.
But it comes up against the difficulty of constituting a sufficiently numerous teaching staff. At the start of the 1962 school year, the state which has just been born must demonstrate its ability to welcome students and students. Back to school, finally set for October 15, is a first challenge. As long as the definitive nature of the exodus is not established, calls towards French teachers are multiplying so that they remain or come back. The catch -up of the exams is organized for all those whose tests were canceled in June. In October, schools used the press to communicate with their students about registration methods.
The academic inspections recruit teachers to all force while the Accelerated Training Internship of the Bouzareah which urgently prepares teachers ends with the holding of a ceremony in the presence of Ferhat Abbas and several ministers. Five hundred trainees have been trained, men and women in parity, half of which are Arabic -speaking (…) The return of fall 1962 is symbolic, because the demand for access to public education had been central in the nationalist movement for several decades. The main challenge is to find enough trained teachers. On the eve of the start of the school year, it is estimated that 18,000 teachers out of 23,500, 1,400 teachers out of 2,000 and almost all teachers in higher education left the country.
The newspapers are not only filled with government calls for French teachers, to encourage them to stay or come back, but also of announcements, school by school, to mobilize teachers and volunteers and inform families of the takeover ”. In “sixty-two”, ” The vital emergency is rather to obtain food, to remove the soil, to organize the start of the schools and to operate the factories while setting up a state, to train teachers, doctors and engineers to ensure the change of scale that accompanies the transition and replacement of the colonial state by the national state. This change of state scale is both an ambition and an emergency.
Two documents reveal the intensity of the effort and investment necessary to carry out it. At the end of 1961 or at the beginning of 1962, in an undated brochure, the general government of Algeria underlined the absurdity of wanting to house and educate the entire colonized population of Algeria: “The schooling of 2,000,000 children is almost unrealizable, since the construction of schools would absorb the entire Algerian budget […] And that it would be necessary to pay 40,000 additional masters. Now, according to the National Statistics Office, in 1970-1971, the number of children in school first in the third fundamental cycle (the elementary course and the average course) was 2,078,361. According to the same data, if at the start of the 1962 school year there were 23,602 primary and secondary teachers, ten years later, at the start of the 1972 school year, it was more than 40,000. more. What was unthinkable for the colonial state had become the reality of the independent state, at the cost of an investment for the future and a considerable effort ”.