Reflections on the educational system in Morocco

  

 Education has always proved to be crucial and essential in every governmental policy in order to thrust the wheels of progress forward. Most of the world’s countries have come to realize, although some countries realized it later than others, that the only efficient way to attain substantive and fundamental progress in all domains of life is to cultivate the power of education.

Every nation has been trying to make the educational system an effective enterprise to produce intellectuals, educated individuals with high academic achievements, and adequate professional expertise so as to meet the demands of the job market and eventually meet life’s requirements.

Nevertheless, when a government fails to create a powerful and effective educational system, or at least reform the current defective educational system, the outcomes of such failure can be devastating. Instead of producing skillful and educated potential workers,  this corrupted educational system essentially produces jobless individuals. 

Morocco is unfortunately not an exception. Who’s to blame and why does failure always have the title and outcome of any policy regarding education? More importantly, is there any way out or an effective resolution to this dilemma that has lasted for so long? The answer to these frequently asked questions is somehow crystal clear but at the same time contentious. However, the failure, or rather the quasi-failure because there are always those who benefit from the bad conditions of the educational system as they benefit from the bad conditions of the country and others who have made their way through this corrupted educational system and achieved success despite the hardship and the obstacles they are facing each and every day, is a living proof that education in Morocco will never be successful and effective unless there is a purely Moroccan educational system which primarily takes the specificities of the Moroccan society and the socio-economic, intellectual, and cultural circumstances of the country into consideration. That is to say, bringing the educational system of Canada or the US or France and applying it in Morocco will not make our education better simply because Morocco is not France, or Canada or the US.

Our educational system produces unqualified teachers [without generalizations] and most of the time jobless BA holders, and consequently we can never talk about reforming the educational institution if our government has not yet come to the realization that what we really need is a radical change and not merely temporary patches to cover the innumerable inadequacies of our education system. You often hear that getting a degree in medicine from Senegal is more valuable than getting it from Morocco; and that for Tunisian students to get admitted at Oxford they need to have only 16/20 in their baccalaureate degree while Moroccans are required to have 18/ 20. The examples are infinite.

I still vividly recall my first day at university, in which we were given a paper that sketched out all the subjects that we were to study in all the six semesters accompanied by the number of hours allocated for each subject. For example, in the first semester, we were supposed to have 48 hours for grammar, 48 hours for comprehension and spoken English, 32 hours for literature of the western world… etc. The reality was something completely different. We didn’t even study one third of what we were supposed to study and because of this Morocco is behind in education. What is designed and outlined in papers is one thing and the reality is something else.  This is not only in educational policies but also for the economic, political, and business domains.

When our educational system begins to generate knowledge producers like scholars and artists not merely knowledge consumers and puppets, when our teachers start to teach us how to be active and creative and to question what we read with a critical lens, when our leaders recognize that the role of education is to produce good ‘humans’ not only good citizens, when we students realize that we are the future of our country and that the only way to succeed is through education, when our politicians begin to act with concrete outcomes rather than giving us fake promises and bombarding us with the same old policies that  we are fed up with,  only then can we be proud of our degrees and cherish every moment we spent in school. Only then will we be motivated to  teach and enlighten the coming generations. We simply need an educational system that will prepare us to meet life requirements not just to meet exam requirements.

All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, rewritten or redistributed without my permission.