Resumen de One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Education in Morocco in the Late 1960s and Today
The article compares education in Morocco today with the situation encountered during my fieldwork in the schools of Sefrou fifty years ago. The article concludes that the basic challenges then are still being faced today. Government responses to the challenges of multi-lingual education, overcrowding, staying back, and teacher training and recruitment are, as they were decades ago, often inconsistent and inadequate. And even though much progress has been made on the literacy front and the achievement of universal primary education, these achievements have not been enough to stem the tide of a host of new challenges, beginning with sheer demographics (a large youth population and an overall population 2.5 times what it was in the late 1960s), the lowering of respect for teaching as a profession, the issues of job security and equitable pay for teachers, and finally the role of internet and social media in fostering an increasingly universal culture of lower student attention spans, expectations of education as a consumer good, etc. The article suggests that as a partial response to these problems, more and more Moroccans are “voting with their feet” by taking refuge in private education, a phenomenon attested to by the rise in the number of private schools to over 20% of all schools in the country.Keywords: Education, Education Policy, Education
