Morocco to Revise 20 Primary School Textbooks, Sparking Controversy

The next school year is likely to be heavily disrupted due to these upcoming revisions. A letter was addressed by the Moroccan Association of Booksellers to the Ministry of National Education, Vocational Training, Higher Education and Scientific Research, reports the daily Al Massae.

About twenty textbooks out of 390 validated are affected by this reform. These are the textbooks for the fifth and sixth grades of primary school. They cover the Arabic language, history, mathematics and science.

According to the same media, all the revised textbooks will bear the mention "new edition" which will distinguish them on the market. In its correspondence, the Moroccan Association of Booksellers warned the ministry against this decision, which could cause countless damage during this exceptional back-to-school period. A back-to-school period that comes this year in a context dictated by the covid-19 pandemic crisis.

The Moroccan Association of Booksellers also invited the ministry to require schools to make public the list of textbooks for the next school year based on the guidelines of the supervisory department.

This approach will thus allow booksellers to prepare the textbooks in time and parents to acquire them before the start of the school year.

For the record, the curricula department at the Ministry of National Education had frozen any textbook revision operation last year, following outbursts of anger from booksellers who had organized sit-ins in front of the ministry’s headquarters.