Muslim children did not attend schools, a trend accelerated after guerrillas took to burning them down.

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 322.

“Beyond such exogenous triggers as Dien Bien Phu, it is not hard to see why an armed revolt should have occurred in the mid-1950s. A visiting French commission acknowledged that 90 per cent of Algeria’s wealth was in the hands of a minority of the European 10 per cent of its ten million people, the large landowners who produced cereals, cork and wine. One-third of the nine million Muslims were either under-employed or chronically unemployed. Low wages were the lot of those in work. Eighty per cent of Muslim children did not attend schools, a trend accelerated after guerrillas took to burning them down. Eighty-five per cent of Muslims were illiterate in a society whose masters harped on about Western civilization. Whereas the European birth rate in Algeria corresponded to European norms, the Muslim figure was ten times higher. While the European population enjoyed a standard of living roughly equivalent to those of Greece, Portugal or Spain, life for the majority Muslim population resembled that of the poorest people in Egypt or India. Western military buffs may be tantalized by tales of the Paras, but the reality for the majority of Algerians was grinding rural poverty and far from casual racism.