The Algerian education system offers an exceptional field for examining the interrelations between language, power and identity. Inherited from an Arabisation policy conceived after independence as an instrument of national sovereignty and symbolic reparation, it has developed through a sustained tension between the institutional language of schooling and the multilingual reality of Algerian society. This article offers a critical synthesis of this sociolinguistic configuration, from the diglossia structuring Arabic education to the recent introduction of English in primary school and, since 2023, at university level, including the paradoxical status of French and the late recognition of Tamazight. Particular attention is paid to the linguistic discontinuity experienced by students when they enter higher education, where French remains the language of many scientific programmes, and to the extension, from 2025, of English-medium instruction to medical and pharmaceutical faculties. We argue that the accumulation of insufficiently prepared transitions produces less a substitution of languages than a superposition of linguistic difficulties, with consequences for academic achievement, self-esteem and learners' identity construction. The article concludes by advocating a shift from the exclusion of languages towards a genuinely convergent plurilingual pedagogy.