A third of the students do not understand the course Has the Arabic education program failed in Morocco?

An official Moroccan report revealed that a third of the country's students did not understand more than 42% of the courses. In shocking data regarding the educational level in the country, vast disparities emerge between the private and public sectors, and raise a question: Has teaching in the Arabic language failed in Morocco?

For years, international reports have been raising the alarm about the education file in Morocco. The most recent of these is the World Bank, which ranked the country in lagging ranks during its study issued last June, concluding that 66% of Moroccan students suffer from “learning poverty.”

The World Bank study adds that 67% of children in Morocco cannot correctly answer one of the reading comprehension questions. Morocco also records low rates of parents' perseverance in reading books to their children before entering primary school. On the other hand, she recommended that the best approach to teaching Arabic to young speakers of Arabic needs to help children move from the stage of "learning to read" to the stage of "reading to learn".

While the latest Moroccan official figures do not differ from their international counterparts in the severity of the diagnosis of the crisis in the country's education sector. This is what a recent report by the "Supreme Council for Education, Training and Scientific Research concludes", talking about the vast disparities in the level of learning among students between the public and private sectors, and the failure of the option to teach in Arabic.

On the other hand, those working in the sector believe that the cause of this chronic faltering of Moroccan education is due to factors other than the language of instruction, and that the public school suffers from structural problems that are responsible for the crisis in the sector.

A third of them do not understand the course

"Shocking data", described by the local press, is the conclusion of the Moroccan "Supreme Council for Education, Training and Scientific Research" report on the state of education in the country. It revealed that 31% of the students did not comprehend the official Arabic language course in the sixth year, 42%, and this percentage does not exceed 32% in rural areas.

As for the third semester of the preparatory level, according to the report, 46% of the students whose comprehension of the Arabic language course does not exceed 36%. Compared to only 10% of them who managed to exceed 90% of the program's absorption. The report showed that students in the private sector outperform students in the Arabic language compared to students in the public sector, and that students in the cities outperform students in the villages.

In his first exit after the report was issued, the Moroccan Minister of Education, Chakib Benmoussa, said: "We are at the beginning of a difficult and long path, and the question is: Will the measures we take contribute to improving quality?" Responding, "We may succeed in measures, and we may not succeed, but if we agree on the goal, all solutions to the problems can be found."

Is teaching in Arabic failed in Morocco?

For those working in the education sector in Morocco, its problems go beyond the language of instruction, although the issue of curricula and courses is part of these problems. This is confirmed by Latifa al-Makhloufi, a teacher of secondary education for the Arabic language, in an interview with TRT Arabic, that "the weakness that Moroccan students suffer is not limited to the language of instruction, and it cannot be held responsible for the students alone, but is the result of the wrong choices that the educational system has known."

This is also confirmed by Abdelwahab Al-Suhaimi, a Moroccan teacher and educational actor, who explained in a statement to TRT Arabic that "there are major structural problems that the Moroccan school suffers from that prevent students from achieving their learning competencies." Suhaimi lists problems starting with overcrowding, as “most Moroccan classrooms in public schools include more than 40 learners, which makes it impossible for the teacher to give each student his right of time and attention, especially with the limited academic time.”

There is also a problem in the curricula. The two professors agree to confirm it. Al-Makhloufi denounces, based on her experience, the fact that “the Arabic language curricula do not keep pace with the times and the student’s educational process, so how can we demand the learner to understand the structural approach in literary criticism when he does not even know A-B literary criticism?” . The result, according to the same spokeswoman, is "students with whom we find difficulty even in the alphabets of dictation that they received at the elementary level."

Abdel-Wahab Al-Suhaimi is also standing on the same issue, saying that "there are curricula that have not been updated for many years and do not keep pace with the developments of the current era, and therefore stand as an obstacle to learning." He added that "the public school attracts various segments of society, including the weak and poor classes, where families in the majority do not follow the educational path of their children" and there are students who "do not open their wallets and notebooks after leaving the classroom" and therefore "the educational effort is lame without this role that the family must have." practice it".