Above all, colonialism was hated for its explicit assumption that the civilizations of colonized peoples were inferior. Using slogans like The White Man's Burden, Europeans asserted their moral obligation to impose their way of life on those endowed with inferior cultures. This orientation was particularly blatant among the French. In the colonies, business was conducted in French. Schools used that language and employed curricula designed for children in France. One scholar suggests that Muslim children probably learned no more about the Maghreb than they did about Australia. In the Metropole, intellectuals discoursed on the weakness of Arabo-Islamic culture. A noted historian accused Islam of being hostile to science. An academician wrote that Arabic―the holy language of religion, art and the Muslim sciences―is “more of an encumbrance than an aid to the mind. It is absolutely devoid of precision.” There was of course an element of truth in the criticisms. After all, Arab reformists had been engaging in self-criticism for decades. But none of this could change or justify the cultural racism in colonial ideologies. To the French, North Africans were only partly civilized and could be saved only by becoming Frenchmen. The reaction of the colonized was of course to defend their identity and to label colonial policy, in the words of Algerian writer Malek Hadad, “cultural asphyxia.” Throughout North Africa, nationalists made the defense of Arabo-Islamic civilization a major objective, a value in whose name they demanded independence. Yet the crisis of identity, provoked by colonial experiences, has not been readily assured and lingers into the post-colonial period. Factors producing militant and romantic cultural nationalism are anchored in time. Memories of colonialism are already beginning to fade. Whether this means that the cultural nationalism characteristic of the Maghreb today will disappear in the future cannot be known. But a preoccupation with identity and culture and an affirmation of Arabism and Islam have characterized the Maghreb since independence and these still remain today important elements in North African life. The countries of the Maghreb do not pursue development in the same way and there have been variations in policies within each country. But all three spend heavily on development. In Tunisia, for example, the government devotes 20-25% of its annual budget to education, and literacy has climbed from 15% in 1956 to about 50% today. A problem, however, is that such advances are not always compatible with objectives flowing from North African nationalism. In Morocco, for instance, when the government decided to give children a n “Arab” education, it was forced to limit enrollments because, among other things, most Moroccans had been educated in French and the country consequently had few teachers qualified to teach in Arabic. Two years later, with literacy rates declining, this part of the Arabization program was postponed. The director of Arabization declared, “We are not fanatics; we want to enter the modern world.”