Abdelqoudous Benezha is teacher trainee at CRMEF Tangier. He obtained a BA degree from Ibn Tofail university in kenitra.
Tangier, Morocco
Building upon
Norman Davies’ proclamation that “the humanists knew that to create a New Man
one had to start from school-boys and students,” modern societies have starved
to formulate a new vision of their educational systems so that they could
fulfill Davies’s vision of the ‘New Man’.
Actually, there are two kinds of people, fakers and makers. Fakers who think 10
years ahead raise plants, whereas makers–teachers–who think 100 years ahead raise
children. In its modern context, education can be regarded as a key to human
experience with which one can explore the legacy left by intellectuals from all
over the globe in order to come up with knowledge that can be both helpful and
generous on its part. Yet, does the Moroccan educational system really see things
through the lenses of Davies?
In order to shed
light on the Moroccan educational system, one should first make reference to
the hierarchy in its Ministry of Education. The Ministry itself is under the
control of its Minister Rachid Belmoukhtar who wants to apply a Western vision
to the Moroccan context, announcing an astonishing static that almost 80 percent
of Moroccan students do not understand what is said in the classroom because of
the prevailing issue of overcrowded classrooms and the lack of a sufficient
teaching staff. This way, Belmoukhtar is aiming at implementing a vision whose
success feeds upon the need to provide more teaching staff and to give an end to
the issue of overcrowded classrooms. A paradoxical approach to overcoming these
challenges, isn’t it?
This omnipresent
desire of our Minister of Education to crash the Moroccan educational system
gave birth to two curses that have sealed teacher trainees’ spirit of work from
being unleashed and fully put under test. These curses are embodied in two
mortal decrees N: 588-15-2 and N: 589-15-2. The former aims at circumcising
teacher trainees’ scholarship aid by half, whereas the latter aims at
separating training from recruitment and that, after a year-long training
program, 10,000 teacher trainees will have to sit
for a recruitment test. As a reaction to those mortal decrees, teacher trainees
have resorted to the politics of boycotting both the theoretical and practical
aspects of their training by aiming at shucking those two decrees against the
wall of heresy, wondering whether they are the homage paid by ignorance to
learning.
Elaborating on
this unbreakable resolve of teacher trainees to put an end to the two decrees,
Hamlet’s statement “What a piece of work is a
man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!” can be regarded as an
explanation to the fact that “knowledge is power,” to use Michel Foucault’s
words, and that teacher trainees are committed to go to the public sphere in
order to make their demands heard. It is important
to note that the revival of this common culture of protesting in the public
sphere among teacher trainees is due to their awareness about the danger that
threatens our already paralyzed educational system, not only because it targets
their rights to recruitment, but also for the sake of keeping it from being privatized.
Simply put, the second decree aims at giving birth to a new kind of diplomas
whose nature is meant to bridge the gap between our Ministry of Education’s
interests and the private sector’s will to such a trade of polarizing
well-trained teaching staff at the lowest expenses.
In a nutshell,
the fact that teacher trainees are committed to oppose these two twists of our
Ministry of Education is generated by their desire to use the public sphere as
“a mediating layer between government and citizens,” to use Habermas’s words, and fueled with a need to form a public
opinion whose consensus is centered around this pressing issue of the two
decrees and their negative impact on the Moroccan educational system. Hence,
the rationale behind teacher trainees’ resolve to put an end to the two mortal
decrees is twofold: to regain their right to recruitment and to revive the
already stagnant Moroccan educational system.
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