Who caused school to turn into a scaring ghoul? Who robbed school from pleasure and made it so ghoulish with little fragrance or real life? Most of those in charge of it have retired much earlier than the age of retirement! Everyone is watching the tragedy from afar, letting the flood ravage everything. Is what came to pass random or deliberate? A long-tailed question mark should be at the end of the former sentence.
The generality of Moroccan schools are depressing and demotivating. Walls are so sullied with chalk and permanent markers that you feel totally bored. Wherever you direct your eyes, you are shocked with insults and vulgar words that I dare not divulge right here.
Miserably enough, the mess has become the norm. Broken light bulbs are a usual frustrating sight. Roofs are rife with “Kala”, a type of drug; they roll tobacco into thin paper and stick it directly under the gum. No sooner they have finished than they stick the roll onto the ceiling leaving a disgusting sight.
Pieces of paper are everywhere. Desks are all holes and teacher desks so dirty. Yogurt and plastic bottles lie usually behind doors. Most classrooms have no plugs and their doors no keys. On top of that, very unhopefully though, a student might pass water behind the classroom door in the absence of the administration staff, leaving a fetid odour. Administrators may succeed in spotting a truant, an uncaring teacher not a student, yet they can never know which student passed water or tore away either flaps of the blackboard or perforated a desk or rather screamed in the hall causing much nuisance to all classrooms nearby!
Caretakers are no more appointed and charwomen are no longer paid. Thus, nobody is there to clean the filth that accumulates day in, day out. Walls teem with caricatures, quotations, equations, whole paragraphs used for cheating, vulgar words, drawings and grotesque scribbles transferred to you as such: ” Derb cibo3bid/ younes predateur/ 3ammo abdo zaze/Habib bmooooot fiiiiik” and the like.
You may every so often engage in voluntary campaigns along with students and clean the immediate environment, yet what role should the ministry of education play? No budget is available for education and profuse grants are devoted to so many unimportant things that you all well know!
You bring with you your laptop, speakers, V.G.A cable and extension. A colleague may poke fun at you because you are carrying a heavy satchel. So lucky you are to get a data show if you want to chase boredom with the broom of innovation and the lure of ICT and bring life into the classroom! Nevertheless, remember the school is equipped with cameras! There it is written on a big colourful sign testifying a miserable contradiction.
The inward void of school is glossed over through superficial make-up and spurious smiles. It is indeed a parable of a have-not wearing a precious finger-ring and borrowing a high-flash convertible car or rather a shantytown brimful of huge satellite dishes. Likewise, it’s a parable of a packet of cigarettes on which are written contradictions: it’s rich and its colours are alluring, yet on its side you read 12 mg of tar, 1 mg of nicotine and 12 mg of carbon!
Should we state with no single doubt to everybody sound of mind that education in Morocco had already passed away. Truancy is at its peak in many high schools; only ten or eight of thirty students attend their lessons the whole year. While a third are attending classes, two thirds are out doing what they guess best. Skipping classes is hardly unnoticeable. Two or three of the former third will get their baccalaureate and one will probably get a job. It is a phenomenon worth pondering on, isn’t it?
While the boys come in with queer hair-styles, girls are all too welcome with no smocks, too much make-up and funny torn jeans. Besides, chewing gum and playing with cell phones haven’t become abnormal.
The state of affairs being so, how dare we boast of quality learning, the National Charter, the Emergency Programme and the Strategic View 2015-2030?! It is not a pessimism-driven article, I am afraid. It is simply a true account of things as they really are.
