Collège Sadiki
Yet educational modernizing had preceded the French to a limited extent. The Zitouna Mosque school in Tunis, which accepted the best graduates of the "kuttab" primary schools, had begun to add more secular topics to its predominantly Muslim curriculum. Also, the reforming prime minister Khair al-Din had at Tunis in 1875 established Sadiki College, a secondary school (lycee), which from the first taught a curriculum oriented toward the modern world, instruction being in Arabic and also in several European languages. Jews also had maintained their own schools, as did the more recently arrived Italians.