“We say that Algeria’s schools have trained monsters,” comments Khaoula Taleb Ibrahim, a professor of education at the University of Algiers, albeit qualifiedly .

After the French were cast out of the country in 1962, its leadership set about building a brave new educational system that would erase the West’s influence from the national identity. However, reports the New York Times,

there were not enough educators qualified to teach in Arabic, so Algeria turned to Egyptians, Iraqis and Syrians — not realizing, officials say now, that many of those teachers had extreme religious views and that they helped plant the seeds of radicalism that would later flourish in a school system where Arabization became interchangeable with Islamization.

Upon reading this, I recalled one stupid rebuttal to us U.S. higher-education reformers — that one-sided education doesn’t in the end matter because students will, in any event, make up their own minds on issues and forge their own worldviews. Tell that to Algerians who fear terrorism and want their children need to learn math and science.