One of a series of papers on comparative education, this report considers curriculum and student life under colonialism through an examination of school knowledge in French West Africa in the first decades of the twentieth century. The monograph is divided into three parts. Part one describes the educational system of interwar West Africa. It emphasizes school organization, admissions and matriculation policies, the composition of the teaching staff, curriculum, and student enrollment. Part two contains translations from interwar elementary and primary textbooks. Part three is composed of translations from students' class notebooks. Focus is on students' French compositions and, in some cases, teacher corrections. What the notebooks reveal about how students perceive themselves, their school, and their aspirations for themselves once they graduate is evaluated. (LP)