Learning in Morocco

Language Politics and the Abandoned Educational Dream

Charis Boutieri

• Éditeur: Indiana University Press
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780253020505
• Sujet: Education
• Sous-sujet: Comparative Education

Learning in Morocco offers a rare look inside public education in the Middle East. While policymakers see a crisis in education based on demographics and financing, Moroccan high school students point to the effects of a highly politicized Arabization policy that has never been implemented coherently. In recent years, national policies to promote the use of Arabic have come into conflict with the demands of a neoliberal job market in which competence in French is still a prerequisite for advancement. Based on long-term research inside and outside classrooms, Charis Boutieri describes how students and teachers work within, or try to circumvent, the system, whose contradictory demands ultimately lead to disengagement and, on occasion, to students taking to the streets in protest.

1

Schools in Crisis

As we walked toward a bookshop in Kenitra, a medium-sized city on the Atlantic coast, Lahiane, a high school student in his senior year, and I passed a gathering of several hundred unemployed demonstrators. This buzzing crowd made up of both sexes and a variety of ages, anger and boredom imprinted on their faces, had gathered outside the town’s city hall to organize yet another rally demanding more jobs that were both secure and more highly paid (see Figure 1.1). Lahiane, his somber gaze fixed on the crowd, smiled bitterly and asked me, “What do you say? Shall I join them?” He had not yet graduated high school.

The pessimism Lahiane voiced has informed the actions of large numbers of unemployed school and university graduates, known by the term diplomés chômeurs. Approximately 27 percent of all educated young Moroccans are unemployed, and more work on an irregular basis or have insecure jobs (African Development Bank 2013, 12). For the last two decades, many of these graduates have spent their days frequenting the offices of labor unions syndicates and demonstrating outside government buildings. Seeking access to white-collar jobs in the new service sector that has superseded Morocco’s mainly agricultural and small industrial economy, these lower-middle and middle class youth have seen their job prospects systematically dwindle. As a consequence, these youth move between advocating forcefully for a chance at social integration and economic prosperity based on the meritocratic evaluation of their educational skills and expressing deep cynicism about the material and ideological value of these skills. It is hardly surprising then that both students and graduates took to the streets during the tumultuous Arab Uprisings (2011–2012). They protested not only the current set-up of political institutions and their own economic marginalization but also that the failure of educational experiences to give them the possibility of pursuing a “decent life.” They staged sit-ins, confronted the security forces, and engaged in highly symbolic acts of self-immolation across the kingdom.¹

FIGURE 1.1

Unemployed graduates demonstrating in downtown Rabat, July 2011. Photograph by author.

What went wrong? The post-independence state that founded the Moroccan public school system deemed it as the counterweight to the socioeconomic and cultural domination of France and the main mechanism for scientific and technological progress; hence public schools were a crucial arena for the remaking of the country along modern(ist) nation-state lines. Yet not more than sixty years later, international donors, the state, and school participants acknowledge that the public schools are in serious trouble. In his address to the nation on August 20, 2013, the sixtieth anniversary of the nationalist struggle against French colonization, King Mohammed VI addressed the persistent, prolonged, and widely acknowledged educational crisis in the country, asking, “Why is it that so many of our young people cannot fulfill their legitimate professional, material, and social aspirations?” Despite considerable advancements, he deplored the current conditions in which the “path” to the pivotal transformation of the educational system “is still arduous and long” (Mohammed al-Sadis al-Alawi 2013). His phrasing echoed an earlier World Bank report that relegated Morocco to the bottom of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region’s educational ranking, a region that the same organization assessed as performing worse than the rest of the developing world. The report bore the emblematic title, “The Road Not Traveled: Educational Reform in the Middle East and North Africa” (IBRD and World Bank 2008). In a more recent evaluation, the World Bank, which funded Morocco’s latest educational reform with two USD100 million loans, bemoaned the fact that, despite relative progress in expanding access to education, increasing gender parity, and raising literacy rates, the Moroccan public educational system had “a long way to go on quality” (World Bank 2013). The use of spatial metaphors, such as “still arduous and long” paths ahead and “untraveled roads,” implied the frustration of both multilateral donors and governments in the region over the unachieved goals of modern public schools.

The international consensus that both national and transnational initiatives since the mid-twentieth century have failed to improve substantially the educational experience of the developing world—which in large part is the postcolonial world—has recently led to a flurry of development activity. The UN Global Education First initiative in July 2013 recognized these problems and renewed the UN’s commitment to educational provision, replacing another global campaign that had run out of steam: UNESCO’s Education for All campaign launched in 1990. The repetitive character and labeling of the Moroccan government’s initiatives to improve the educational system—from the National Charter for Education 1999–2009 to the Emergency Plan 2009–2012 and the Action Plan 2013–2016—hint at the state’s alarm over the demise of the post-independence educational dream.

A largely untold story that illuminates both the frustration and alarmism pervading the Moroccan public, as well as national and international official spheres, is that of the nationalist policy of educational Arabization. Its aim was to translate public school curricula into fuṣḥā (Classical Arabic) with the objective of creating a homogeneous, literate, arabophone society. The post-independence school was the structural heir of French Protectorate schooling, which was divisive along linguistic, racial, and economic lines. Despite these foundations, the post-independence school became the scaffold on which was built a Moroccan nationalism expressed in Arabo-Muslim terms and dependent on the expansive use of the Arabic language. Not only would the Arabic language replace French as the language of instruction but it would also unite a multilingual population versed in varieties of dārija (Moroccan Arabic) and Berber. Given political tensions and the complexities of the multilingual experience of learning, the incorporation of Arabization inside the public schools has been tenuous and incomplete. Moroccan students are educated in Arabic until they graduate high school, but most have to shift to French for higher education and then have to manage a predominantly francophone and increasingly anglophone job market. Given this linguistic split and their late entry into francophone instruction, the job market treats them, in their own words, as “multilingual illiterates” and hence unemployable.

The material implications of this language policy have brought graduates into ideological tension with previous generations that fought for and invested in cultural decolonization through fuṣḥā. Arabization, which has promoted a single unifying national language at the expense of the spoken registers, appears to young people to exclude and marginalize the substantial number of uneducated Moroccans and the sizable Berber (non-arabophone) population. The ambivalent implementation of this policy through an ambiguous mix of theocratic, monarchical, and avowedly modernizing mechanisms has limited the prospects of educated Moroccans and alienated them from the state. Filtered down to their younger siblings still in school, Lahiane being a prime example, this alienation has turned into a broader disengagement from public education, the key arena for the implementation of Arabization. Shockingly low retention rates—only 23 percent of all incoming primary school students graduate high school (Rose 2014, 38)—are one concrete indicator of Lahiane’s and his peers’ disappointment with public school education and the state.

Drawing on long-term fieldwork in and around public high schools, this book traces the origins and facets of Morocco’s educational crisis, explores its impact on the lives and aspirations of students, and narrates the multiple ways in which students take learning into their own hands. Privileging the voices of these students as well as those of their teachers and parents, I show the critical role that linguistic tensions play in their efforts at integration, participation, and creativity. These linguistic tensions and their inventive handling by students shed light on the country’s fundamental struggles around nominal versus actual decolonization from France, the negotiation of ethnolinguistic difference, the trials of political transformation, and the management of the national economy and consequently of the labor market. These struggles are complex and multilayered; what adds to their intricacy is that they currently play out on the bigger stage of global neoliberalism. By neoliberalism, I refer to the current period of global consolidation of a fifty-year U.S.-led market strategy of penetrating national economies and to a matching ideology of self-reliance and self-management in an imagined arena of unfettered competition. Neoliberal policies deregulate the labor market, reduce state funding of social provisions such as education, and encourage private sector growth. In its turn, neoliberal rhetoric naturalizes the adjustment of social and cultural practice to the logic of the market, placing communication skills at the altar of global competitiveness. Moroccan youth at school grapple with the uncertainties of both state-promoted identities and globally oriented market identities in their quest for economic survival and social integration. This quest takes place in putatively accessible but in essence very uneven platforms (Heller 2003; Ong 2006).²

In investigating Moroccan youth’s experience in the Arabized public schools, I probe the linguistic tensions that have tripped up students since decolonization and, through these tensions, show how the definition of “valuable knowledge and skills” is being rearticulated in the period of neoliberalism (see Figure 1.2). Arguing that linguistic resources are central to the meaning and management of both political institutions and the economy, this book merges the cultural consequences of educational language policy with its material ramifications. In doing so it makes the broader claim that the cultural dilemmas of post-colonial societies are inseparable from the mode of insertion of these societies into world capitalist markets. The robust debate over language and knowledge that takes place inside Moroccan high schools becomes my entry point to rethinking the role of the public school in the contemporary state. This new formulation not only has urgent implications for the future of young Moroccans and other youth in the region but also resonates with the larger predicament of formal schooling across the globe.

FIGURE 1.2

Urban high school. Photograph by author.

“Education is the future!” is the mantra of colonialism, nationalism, and neoliberal modernity. Endorsed by policy makers, pundits, and a general public made up of members of most political persuasions, this mantra extends into a series of arguments about the inherent value of formal mass-based education: education should promote, if not ensure, individual empowerment, erase gaps between sociocultural divides, encourage economic growth on a large scale, and support the cultivation of the values of democracy. In the field of international development, a sense of urgency in bringing educational systems across the globe up to contemporary Euro-American standards has imbued the missions of multilateral agencies and the advocacy of developing states for decades. Since the 1980s—the period of expansive market liberalization—a strategic push for global uniformity has justified the inculcation of new skills for both labor and citizenship. These skills hinge on the principles of entrepreneurship and flexible accumulation (Harvey 1990). Predominantly Muslim societies have faced particular pressure to conform to these objectives within the post-9/11 landscape, in which foreign policy has located religious fundamentalism and “the clash of civilizations” in traditional spaces of pedagogy—essentially reformulating the War on Terror as a pedagogical matter.³ There is little doubt that public education undergirds geopolitical rhetoric and policy on a global scale. Moroccan public education is both a good example of this multifaceted emphasis and the case study that throws the modernist paradigm of education into turmoil. Frustration, cynicism, and alarm over public education in Morocco reveal significant fissures in the broader teleological and hegemonic narrative of the modern school.

THE WORD IS A LUXURY

In February 2008, the World Bank report on public education mentioned earlier was disseminated by the country’s mass media and sparked a series of public conversations that trickled into the urban high schools where I was conducting fieldwork. The report ranked Morocco particularly low among the MENA countries, placing it at number eleven of the fourteen countries in the region, above only Iraq, Yemen, and Djibouti. The gist of the World Bank’s diagnosis was that “education systems do not produce the skills needed in an increasingly competitive world” (IBRD and World Bank 2008, 1). The report went on to address the “tenuous relationship” in the MENA region between education and development, defining the latter primarily as economic growth and secondarily as the redress of social inequality. The quality of instruction in the region was “too low for schooling to contribute to growth and productivity,” especially in view of the emerging predominance of “the knowledge economy” (2008, 5–8). Predictably, the solutions the report advocated required further liberalization of the job market and increasing privatization of educational institutions. In reality, such solutions were well underway in Morocco as in Egypt, India, and elsewhere under the auspices of the same international organizations that produced the report in question (Cohen 2004; Bayat and Herrera 2010, Lukose 2009; Jeffrey 2010; Mazawi 2010).⁴

The release of the report caused a great stir among Moroccan institutional and social spheres. Confirming the report’s validity, the Moroccan press denounced the state’s educational failures (Mokhlis and Zainabi 2008; Qattab 2008). Finally in April 2008 the state responded: per the king’s recommendation, the Majlis al-ʿAlā li-l-Taʿlīm (High Council for Education) announced the Emergency Reform 2009–2012 plan. Its objectives were to build new schools for the increased population of children and youth, improve the monitoring of student progress, ensure teacher accountability, and accelerate privatization that would reduce the government’s financial and administrative responsibility for providing formal education (Ministry of National Education and Professional Training 2008).⁵ Tellingly, the reforms also shifted the educational emphasis to technology, science, and foreign languages. Thus the cluster of concepts that the World Bank and the Moroccan government used as a basis for problem diagnosis and the development of solutions—population increase, financial limitations, innovation, accountability, technology, science, and languages—captured the neoliberal reading of education through the instrumentalization of population size, budget, and selves. What is interesting is that, even though the report did not specify the “skills necessary for productivity and growth” or “the knowledge economy,” these skills emerged as the measurable and inevitable outcomes of improved educational engineering (Hall 2005; Urcuioli 2008). What the report at best overlooked and at worst purposefully sidelined were the historical and political circumstances in which Moroccan public schools introduced and valued the subjects—technology, science, and foreign languages—that produced the skills in question. These historical and political circumstances and how they were changing in the present moment were the explicit focus of discussion among Moroccan school participants. Their diagnosis of the situation, which long preceded the World Bank’s assessment, shifted the focus from interventions such as upgraded infrastructure and pedagogical planning into another sphere: the sphere of deliberation on the meaning of valuable skills and knowledge.

The following scene at a teachers’ assembly exemplifies this process of deliberation. In October 2007 at the regional offices of Gharb-Chrarda-Béni Hssen, the local inspector for the French-language course, Ahmed Zirari, joined the regional inspector-coordinator, Abdellah Azizi, to discuss curriculum design and administrative arrangements with forty secondary school teachers.⁶ All the participants seemed to know each other well as they exchanged news in dārija interspersed with French words and sentences. Their nearly constant code switching was an indication of their professional niche and of their status as urban civil servants. Inspector Zirari interrupted the chit-chat to welcome everyone with this sentence: “bismillāh al-raḥmān al-raḥīm, marḥaba bikum fī hadhā al-ijtimāʿ” (In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful, I welcome you to this gathering), before switching to French to conduct most of the meeting. After his welcome, the inspector launched into a plea that went straight to the crux of public education dilemmas in Morocco:

Students come to us with great gaps despite the importance of this language. Sometimes they arrive at middle school without knowing how to read or write in French. Remember, this is not just knowledge that we pass on, it is a skill that cannot be obtained outside the classroom due to the sociocultural level of our students. The French language in the Moroccan context is the key to professional and social success. What will our students do after the Baccalaureate [the state-sanctioned national exam, equivalent of high school diploma)? As Moroccan citizens, we cannot ignore this reality. The word is a luxury, so I ask you to give everyone their part of the word. [emphasis added]

Mr. Zirari’s entire speech and his final message in particular, “the word is a luxury,” are remarkable for positing the politics of language as central to the instability of the educational system. This does not mean that he did not acknowledge that Moroccan public schools also face a number of structural impediments: overcrowded classrooms, inadequate facilities, an outdated curriculum and method of instruction, and differential access to education in relation to location, class and gender. Rather, he maintained, that even if these inhibiting factors were somehow surgically removed from the system, doing so would not eradicate the deep-seated linguistic discrepancies that undercut student efforts at academic and professional advancement and, concomitantly, their aspirations for empowerment and creativity. The inspector thus openly claimed that instruction in the French language could ensure the academic and professional success of students in an ostensibly fully Arabized public school system.

The policy of Arabization was a project of sociocultural engineering driven by the replacement of the French language with Arabic in educational, administrative, and economic domains.⁷ Morocco implemented the policy in the mid-twentieth century as a response to the colonial experience and the rise of regional nationalism in the MENA region. The alliance of the emerging nationalist party al-Istiqlāl (The Independence) with King Mohammed V planted the seeds of Arabization during the French Protectorate (1912–1956) and set in motion implementation of this policy in the aftermath of independence. Reacting against the Protectorate’s judicial, pedagogical, and social separation between Arabs and Berbers and the equally divisive francophone education for the elites, the alliance crystallized an Arabo-Muslim narrative as the foundation of Moroccan nationalism. Mohammed al-Fassi, the first minister of education in independent Morocco, concretized this vision through jumpstarting the Arabization of public education in 1957. Arabization crucially depended on the expansive u...