Morocco Considers Reverting to Arabic-Language Education After Decades of French Emphasis

30 years of Arabization of the school system, in vain. The Moroccan authorities are not concerned with preserving this legacy, the foundations of which were laid in the 1980s. This decision, recalls the newspaper Libération, was indeed taken at the time to symbolically reconnect with the national identity, after the Protectorate, and also to strengthen, on the political scale, the role of the conservatives against the dissident left.

The ongoing reforms in the Kingdom unfortunately do not take this legacy into account. The tragedy is that a large part of higher education and the world of work is more oriented towards French, the language of the colonizer, to the detriment of Arabic and Amazigh (Berber), the two official languages in Morocco. In 2018, it had about 12.7 million French speakers out of 35 million inhabitants.

It is also regrettable that, in the Moroccan education system, subjects initially taught in Arabic become taught in French, without transition. This situation, as curious as it may seem, is justified by the enrollment, in expensive foreign schools of French expression, of the children of high-ranking political officials, nevertheless in favor of the Arabization of education.

While Morocco is neglecting this strategic issue of the Arabization of education, the conservatives continue to sound the alarm. Proof of this, during the adoption of the framework law on the reform of education, voted by a majority in the first Chamber of Parliament, all the deputies of the Islamist party (PJD), at the head of the governing coalition, expressed their discontent by opposing the vote on the articles concerning linguistic alternation, and by putting back on the table the question of national identity, notes the same source.