The last vestige of the powerful French empire, New Caledonia is a small group of islands in the South-West Pacific whose politics has largely been dominated by the Kanak people's quest for independence since the 1970s. Supported locally by an extremist, anti-independence separatists, the successive French governments rejected the sovereignty of the Kanak people. This state of affairs culminated into serious conflict and violence, which ceased at the end of 1988 with a peace agreement that focused on the "development and rebalancing" of the critical situation of the Kanak people and the corrective action in their historical exclusion from all the sectors, particularly in education and knowledge. It was agreed that this new process should lead to a referendum on independence at the end of 2018, ten years after the signing of that political agreement. This article analyzes some of the dimensions of the educational policy of French colonization in New Caledonia, including the role of education in the creation and reproduction of colonial relations, the treatment of Kanak languages in education, and the low performance of the Kanak in the French education system, as well as the evolution of the Kanak popular schools movement. It examines why colonial education was a main target in the Kanak independence movement and the significance of the struggles in the field of education, an important factor in the future prospects of the Kanak people.