According to the 2007 World Bank Middle East and North Africa (MENA) report, compellingly titled The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa, Arab education had fallen behind the rest of the world. Despite considerable government and international subsidies, public education systems in the region, argued the report, were “not yet fully equipped to produce graduates with the skills and expertise necessary to compete in a world where knowledge is essential to making progress” (emphasis added).Footnote ¹ Morocco ranked among the worst performers. Endorsing this international assessment, the Moroccan government recommended a restructuring of public education that would remodel student competences: in April 2008, under the king's recommendation, the High Council for Education (Majlis al-ʿAla li-l-Taʿlim), headed by ʿAbdelaziz Meziane Belfkih, announced the Emergency Reform Plan for 2009–2012 in order to address some of the World Bank's criticisms.Footnote ² Yet, despite constant chastizing by the press and seemingly ongoing efforts on the part of the government, Moroccan education is considered, to this day, to be in a state of serious “crisis.”Footnote ³ In this article, I argue that this technical diagnostics, according to which learning is the outcome of educational engineering and the management of changing demographics, divorces education from its sociocultural context and depoliticizes it by obscuring the specific gestures—including those of international policymakers—that underpin the production and dissemination of knowledge in Morocco.Footnote ⁴ In sum, such diagnostics overlook the fact that the public school has been the cultural battleground for the negotiation of Morocco as a “postcolonial” and “modernized” country—notions that invite, rather than exhaust, analytical exploration.

My aim is to interrogate the policy of educational Arabization, which was the joint response of the first nationalist government and King Mohammed V to the French Protectorate's (1912–56) ethnic, spatial, judicial, and pedagogical separatism. Arabization would theoretically accomplish the conversion of the educational sector and the administrative and economic spheres into Arabic-speaking (fuṣḥā) domains and ensure the Moroccanization of civil servants.Footnote ⁵ I maintain that Arabophone education has been in fierce antagonism with the recycling of French Protectorate pedagogical visions in the school, the job market, and processes of national development and that the widely acknowledged crisis of public education relates intimately to this competition. Today, while the vulnerable state of education in the country is an object of vigorous discussion, the rivalry in question is officially silenced.Footnote ⁶

In formulating this argument, I draw upon ethnographic research conducted inside public high schools of a middle-sized town located in the Rabat-Salé-Zemmour-Zair administrative region between 2007 and 2009.Footnote ⁷ Following a debate among teachers and inspectors of French in secondary education, I trace the renewed promotion of the French language inside the nominally Arabized curriculum. I show that the Arabized Moroccan public school tacitly divides students into academic disciplines according to language skills, promoting the sciences and French and sidelining the humanities and Arabic. Given that the current job market, led by national and international agendas that highlight the need for technological advancement, is largely beyond the reach of those trained in the Arabophone humanities, these graduates are destined for precarious professional futures. The relationship of the scientific high school stream to French constitutes a prism through which we can question the type of knowledge that is understood to contribute to Moroccan modernization as well as the historico-political landscape in which this knowledge was gestated. While too dichotomous to fully account for complexity on the ground, the metaphor à deux vitesses—used by a high school teacher to describe a contemporary experience of teaching and learning—alludes to unequal linguistic pluralism that leads to differential academic and social chances. This metaphor can point to other disjunctures that are not dealt with in this article, such as the rampant differentiation between rural and urban schooling, the partial representation of the Amazighophone culture inside the Arabized public school, and the gender gap in literacy.Footnote ⁸

Through observations inside public education administrations, high school classrooms, and student homes, I establish significant continuities between colonial pedagogical visions, nationalist agendas, and contemporary development initiatives. In this light, the social inequality encouraged by linguistic pluralism at school is not really carved out of new global configurations but is actually based on older schemata of social hierarchy—schemata that are disguised by their regular renovation. Accounts of colonial schooling in Morocco have highlighted the intentional fragmentation of the educational landscape and the complex motivations of those who participated in the different pedagogical settings put in place by the French Protectorate (1912–56).Footnote ⁹ These accounts constitute an invitation to explore how the structural tensions of this colonial educational experience affect the lives of Moroccan students in the present. Moroccan sociolinguists have identified the presence of hierarchical linguistic pluralism despite Arabization but have not delved into the symbiotic relationship between French and science as the specific mechanism through which social hierarchy is generated along linguistic lines.Footnote ¹⁰ I provide a systemic analysis of public education with a particular attention to the political gestures that underpin it without, however, equating the intentions of the system to its outcomes. By focusing on the experiential impact of such hierarchy on the lives of school participants (students, teachers, and parents), I demonstrate that participants reappropriate aspects of the public school's design in order to advance their own agendas. This reappropriation leads to even more fragmented and unanticipated paths to educational promotion and social integration than those envisaged by educational policymakers. These paths cannot be adequately accounted for by centralized and holistic theories of pedagogy and the sociological category of class or by an assumed dichotomy between state agendas and international patronage.Footnote ¹¹ Such explanations risk understating the degree of volatility and fragmentation of the modern Moroccan school and its society, as well as the school's divergence from conventional sociological models of pedagogy and social stratification. Given these discrepancies, it seems that neither the particularity of the contemporary Moroccan school nor its relationship to knowledge can be defined in advance; both need to be understood and theorized, instead, with the help of ethnographic examination.

In this article, educational anxiety emerges as sociocultural critique. The circumvention of public education through privatization, parallel schooling, corruption, or charity—all responses to this anxiety—is telling of a radical uncertainty about how to plan the future of the next generation. I highlight this dynamic at a moment when the set of techniques that naturalize certain educational choices no longer produces its desired effect and, consequently, the edifice that supports this particular institutional knowledge collapses. In light of the 2011 and 2012 youth-led revolts in North Africa, in which Moroccan students have been committed participants, I offer what I believe to be a salient account of what precedes and frames this political mobilization. By claiming that what appears as a sudden move to the streets may in part be a gradual result of a collective disengagement from the public school as a space of empowerment and integration, I emphatically reorient our attention away from the technical diagnostics of international policymakers and toward the political nature of all learning. Given the affinity between the experiences of education and citizenship, I maintain that an ethnographically and historically informed portrayal of this educational crisis is central to an understanding of contemporary Moroccan society.

THE WORD IS A LUXURY

The meeting of French teachers and inspectors that initiates my narrative took place in October 2008 at the Regional Academy offices of a middle-sized town in the western zone of Morocco (the regional academies are branches of the Moroccan Ministry of Education sanctioned with the monitoring of secondary education). The academic year was just starting after a slow month of Ramadan. At the meeting, the inspector of the French course was joined by the regional inspector–coordinator in order to discuss curriculum and administrative issues with forty teachers of the secondary level, which is divided into three years of ʿadādī /collège (junior high school) and three years of thanāwī/lycée (high school).Footnote ¹² All participants seemed to know each other well as they exchanged news in dārija (Moroccan Arabic) interspersed with French words; this intense code switching is an indication of their professional niche and of their general cultural capital as urban civil servants. The inspector, Ahmed Zirari, interrupted all small talk in order to formally welcome everyone in fuṣḥā—bi-ism Allāh al-raḥmān al-raḥīm, marḥaba bi-kum fī hadhā al-ijtimāʿ (In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful, I welcome you to this gathering)—before he switched to French, in which most of the meeting was conducted.Footnote ¹³ After this welcome, Inspector Zirari launched into a speech that touched upon what I consider to be the crux of public education dilemmas in Morocco. Here is a telling extract:

After this short speech, practical arrangements regarding examination and evaluation formats were made before the inspector opened the floor to questions. A young teacher raised her hand and responded to the speech in a clearly defensive tone: “You have to think about the reality of our classes! How could we make students read novels when they can't pronounce single words? You need to think of public schools as very different from private schools or la mission [French diplomatic mission schools]!” Immediately after this intervention, a middle-aged teacher took the floor: he pointed out that, while in the past a delegation from the Institut Français (French Cultural Institute) would make the rounds of high schools in the area to distribute books to students and teachers, these days schools see nothing from the French embassy. The inspector responded: “It is true, nothing is free from France anymore.” He was about to go on but was interrupted by a teacher who stood up to address him looking very distressed.

The teacher refers to the educational bilingualism between Arabic (fuṣḥā) and French, which is mapped onto the wider complexities of multilingualism in Morocco.Footnote ¹⁴ Empathizing with her frustration, teachers across the room nodded in agreement. Seeing the teacher on the verge of tears, and probably realizing that the discussion was about to become even more heated, the regional inspector–coordinator, Mustafa Azizi, shrugged his shoulders and smiled nervously: “Who is responsible? Who is to blame? I have no idea!” Feeling the burden of his administrative position, Azizi responded rather elusively; however, on another occasion during my fieldwork, he had concurred with the teachers’ assessment: “At school, as well in society, the status of the French language is not clearly defined. Is it a foreign language, a second language, or something more?” At the meeting, Inspector Zirari acknowledged the difficulty expressed by the teachers and emphasized how vital it was to solve it: “We all know that everyone wants a good grade in French. Every year we receive more than 400 requests for re-evaluation of exam scripts in our academy alone, especially—as you would expect—from students of the scientific stream.”

The inspector's opening speech and the comments of the teachers at the Regional Academy meeting unearth the disproportionate importance of French for the scientific stream in a theoretically Arabized school. I argue that this dynamic is crucial to an analysis of the postindependence language dilemmas that underpin the contemporary educational experience of students. In the following section, I explore the emergence and promotion of the scientific stream and its relationship to francophonie, from colonial schooling to the modern-day public school system.

THE DISTINGUISHED INGÉNIEUR IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

The Academy meeting, one of many addressing these types of tensions that I attended, is especially intriguing if we map it onto the education policies of the last fifty years.Footnote ¹⁵ Arabization—announced after independence, implemented with many false starts, and completed in 1989 up to, but not including, the university level—appears to be caught between the nationalist Arabo-Islamic cultural campaign and the renewal of French Protectorate pedagogical visions. These two dynamics have been in a process of constant rearticulation within the frame of national development, whose technological imperative is supported by both the government and the patronage of Morocco's economy by organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. HistoricalFootnote ¹⁶ and historical anthropologicalFootnote ¹⁷ accounts of education during the French Protectorate have alluded to processes of cross-fertilization between colonial visions, elite and popular interests, and nationalist policies. I use this intellectual backdrop to illuminate the contemporary experience of public school participants and simultaneously contest the ahistorical narrative of educational tensions provided by international development commentators.

Schooling under the Protectorate was not numerically important, because “only a tiny percentage of the Moroccan population bore the brunt of the French educational and cultural effort,” yet the schools acquired prestige by forming a native colonial elite.Footnote ¹⁸ Ahmed Moatassime refers to the landscape of colonial schooling as éclaté (fragmented).Footnote ¹⁹ Comparing French Protectorate schooling with that provided by the Spanish Protectorate in the north of Morocco, Ahmed Zouggari finds important structural similarities.Footnote ²⁰ He claims that the creation of multiple systems of education corresponded to what the two protectorates considered to be different local realities—Arab and Berber, urban and rural—and was instrumental to their policies of social conservatism and their need for intense surveillance. From the beginning of the 20th century, there were clearly demarcated, multiple educational systems set up to maintain, or produce, social hierarchy. Maréchal Lyautey, résident général of France in Morocco, appears to have been very keen to assure the existing elites that traditional hierarchies would not be disrupted.Footnote ²¹

The Protectorate competed with, though did not eradicate, traditional education—which began at the msid (Qurʾanic school), continued through the madrasa, and culminated at prestigious religious universities such as the Qarawiyyin of Fes or the Yusufiyya of Marrakesh—by molding a triangular system of education: Franco-European, Franco-Muslim, and Franco-Berber. The Franco-European schools were elite institutions under the control of the résidence générale and hosted primarily the offspring of French expatriates. The Franco-Muslim option was divided into two streams: one addressed the rural population and another the urban Moroccan elite. For the former, Lyautey envisaged vocational and agricultural training and, for this reason, oriented the curricula away from both humanities and scientific subjects. Elite schools consisted of primary education establishments, les écoles des fils de notables (schools for the sons of notables), and secondary education establishments, the collèges musulmans (Muslim colleges); both recruited students from urban commercial families.Footnote ²² These collèges—such as Moulay Idriss in Fes, Moulay Youssef in Rabat, and Sidi Mohammed in Marrakesh—were fee paying, and screening for entry was vigorous. Their intent was to cultivate bilingual and bicultural dispositions; therefore, students learned about Moroccan culture through Arabic literature, while sciences and math were instructed in French.

In addition, the Protectorate administration created special franco-berbères schools, such as the Collège Berbère d'Azrou, as spaces that would potentially produce a powerful Berber constituency isolated from the dangers of nationalist propaganda. To ensure such distance, Arabic and the teaching of the Qurʾan disappeared altogether from the curriculum.Footnote ²³ To complicate things further, reformist ʿulamaʾ and proto-nationalist groups took the initiative to set up a type of renovated msid called madrasa ḥurra (free school) during the 1920s and 1930s. Restricted in number, the free schools offered an Arabophone alternative to French-administered schooling, while they borrowed some of its arrangements: division into levels, the existence of multiple classes, and a pedagogical emphasis on analysis and critical thinking.Footnote ²⁴ Finally, we should not forget the Alliance Universelle Israelite, which founded its first school in Tetouan in 1872. The institutions of the Alliance were renowned for their quality and taught primarily in French; they hosted a mixed population of Moroccan Jewish and Muslim students.Footnote ²⁵

For the purposes of this discussion, the collèges musulmans are especially interesting because they attracted the sons of the urban elite. Using their school ties and their alumni organizations, graduates of these institutions formed the proto-nationalist groups that would eventually lead the struggle for emancipation from the Protectorate. Contrary to the Franco-Berber schools and the free schools, graduates of these institutions had access to the French lycées inside Morocco and, eventually, to universities in France. Pierre Vermeren focuses on these graduates in order to analyze the entanglement between Protectorate pedagogical planning and the visions of the ruling strata; at the center of their relationship lies a complex involvement with the French language.Footnote ²⁶ Vermeren's argument, which informs this article's main thesis, is that administrative and military independence from the Protectorate was far from a turning point in the pedagogical involvement of France in North Africa. On the contrary, in the domain of education, what occurred is best described as an amplification and intensification of earlier tensions between traditionally educated elites and emerging French-educated ones. For Vermeren, these “modern” graduates were initially drawn to the medical profession and subsequently moved to other scientific tracks. They confronted the religious elites of the Qarawiyyin and the Yusufiyya, undermining the prestige of these institutions.Footnote ²⁷

The inequality of the power struggle between modern and traditional elites is an object of debate, with Jacques Berque arguing that these two elites were more intermingled than would initially appear.Footnote ²⁸ It is, however, certain that the two elite groups came together to fashion the nationalist, anticolonial discourse. Their joint campaign, supported by the reformist salafī movement, is the precursor to the policies of Moroccan Arabization that vindicated the Arabo-Muslim character of the country.Footnote ²⁹ Postindependence Arabization was led by the nationalist party al-Istiqlal (Independence) and presided over by ʿAllal al-Fassi, an ʿālim (scholar) of the Qarawiyyin. Spencer Segalla's work has investigated the connections between the social vision of the French Protectorate and the nationalist project, demonstrating how close the conservatism of the Moroccan nationalist agenda remained to the French Protectorate's ideals of nonassimilation.Footnote ³⁰ Yet, it is important to notice that this nationalist ruling group did not adopt a singular cultural vocabulary but combined its political Arabism with a deep appreciation of the intellectual production of France and a conviction of the capacity of the French language to communicate modernity. The figure most often mentioned to me by school participants as the personification of this ambiguity was ʿAllal al-Fassi himself. Common opinion is torn between his passionate support of Arabization and the fact that he educated his children at the French mission school. However reductive, this view is suggestive of a bifurcation of the ideal of Arabization since its inception. It is worth remembering that, in imposing Arabic (fuṣḥā), the government sidestepped the linguistic plurality of the country and turned away from the Moroccan vernaculars (dārija and the Amazigh languages) in favor of a homogeneous Arabo-Muslim official culture.

The nationalist group's attachment to salafī thought was effectively harnessed by the Moroccan king Mohammed V, who thereby ensured the preservation of his status as amīr al-muʾminīn (commander of the faithful) in the independent state.Footnote ³¹ Hassan II (heir to Mohammed V) was even less inclined to associate Arabization with a suppression of the French language than were the political elites previously described. Therefore, the public educational system established after independence can be thought of simultaneously as the structural heir of the French school and as the symbol of salafī-inspired nationalist ideology. Some of the teachers I conversed with were skeptical about the motives behind this official cultural agenda; they perceived Arabization as Hassan II's plan to counter the development of the political left, which had intellectual and political connections with France.Footnote ³² Notwithstanding its motives, the postindependence declaration of the conversion of school subjects from French into Arabic was undercut by political inconsistencies. In 1957, during the aftermath of independence, the minister of foreign affairs, Ahmed Belafrej, signed cultural conventions with France that guaranteed the dissemination of the French language in Morocco and, in 1966, while the primary school was being Arabized with the help of teachers brought from Egypt, a surprisingly large number of French teachers moved to Morocco to teach at the secondary and university levels.Footnote ³³ It is interesting that the scientific subjects continued to be taught in French long after the Arabization of the humanities; the Arabization of the sciences at the secondary level was finally put in place in 1983.

The postindependence school, announced as a coup de force for the generalization of social and material opportunity, thus proved incapable of overcoming the Protectorate's deep-seated educational elitism. This elitism persisted due to the value attributed to scientific academic streams; these streams, which were initially only instructed in French, carried the double potential for individual success and national development. In 1966, Minister of Education Benhima was quoted saying, “Le pays se construit et attend ses élites” (The country is being constructed and awaits its elites).Footnote ³⁴ The metaphor of “construction” becomes pertinent here, as it is revelatory of how the technical and technological imperatives of national development got tied to the promotion of scientific disciplines. Despite the Arabization of the sciences at the secondary level in 1983, the French language was never truly separated from this domain, since it persisted in higher education as the language of science instruction.Footnote ³⁵ Moreover, under the sponsorship of French higher education institutions, the scientific high school stream was gradually restructured so that it could bypass the standard educational path. Through the creation of classes préparatoires (preparatory classes), the most esteemed branch of the stream, high school students studying sciences-maths (mathematical sciences) could skip the university and go directly to the considerably more prestigious écoles professionnelles and grandes écoles (higher professional institutions) in Morocco and Europe. These classes prépas, as they are usually referred to, are almost entirely Francophone.

Given the relative impenetrability of the sciences-maths stream (it is telling that not all high schools offer this renowned disciplinary option), the scientific professions steadily acquired material potential and undisputed prestige. This prestige contrasted with the devaluation of the overloaded Arabized humanities that admitted the majority of public school graduates. In the 1980s, when the civil service of the state, the major recruiter of Arabophone graduates, reached the capacity of employees that it could absorb, these already near impenetrable scientific directions became the sole opportunity for social ascension in the public and the private domains, perpetuating, to this day, widespread admiration for the distinguished figure of the ingénieur.Footnote ³⁶ In the meantime, the country's technological ambition persists, as shown by the Ministry of Education's “emergency goal” to strengthen the scientific competence of Moroccan students.Footnote ³⁷ The support of this educational direction by the international patrons of Morocco's economy is clear in the World Bank report that introduces this article:

What the previous statement demonstrates is that development, as defined by international policymakers, maintains a basic paradox: framed primarily as an imperative for technological advancement, development encourages the carving out of paths to academic promotion and professional integration that depend on the linguistic mastery of French inside an educational system that is officially Arabized. In opposition to this assessment, my goal was to underline the historical and political landscape against which the inspector's plea and the debate at the Academy meeting should be placed. In the next section, I examine how this historical relationship between linguistic pluralism, disciplinary orientation, and social stratification is recycled in the structural organization of the contemporary public school.

IN CLASS

I became acutely aware of the continuity between this historical framework and the type of knowledge sanctioned by the Arabized school today (i.e., French and science) while observing high school classrooms in the same district where the Academy meeting took place. One of my visits was to a school situated five minutes from the border of a slum (barak; pl. barārek), which is apparently inhabited by 11,000 people. Many of the students of the school lived in the slum. The teacher who hosted me in her class, Khadija Elgasmi, spent a double session lecturing on a Moroccan Francophone novel by Sefriouri entitled Boîte à Merveilles (Case of Wonders).Footnote ³⁹ Her analytical focus was on “how to be oneself in the language of another.” I found this theme rather ironic, considering that the linguistic predicament of these students was quite unlike that of perfectly bilingual novelist Sefriouri. Evidence of such divergence included the fact that, in a French class where there is a ban on speaking Arabic, students either remained silent or contributed with disparate words whenever asked a question. Their teacher looked exasperated. During the break, she rushed me out of the classroom and confided:

Intrigued by the temporal—and technical—metaphor of deux vitesses as alluding to the disciplinary and linguistic fissures of the public school, I asked the teacher her opinion about the connection between scientific and foreign-language skills. She replied that the students of the scientific stream are more motivated to learn French, because “it is their passport to the grandes écoles . . . we don't hide it from them—the key to success is math and French.” In the distinction the teacher makes between the scientific and humanities streams, which echoes the comments made at the Regional Academy meeting, lies the most intimate defiance of Arabization: the scientific stream, the only one that currently leads to employment, still promotes French instead of Arabic.

One way this promotion is tacitly arranged is through the course weighting for French in the baccalaureate cycle. This cycle corresponds to the junior and senior years of high school and is broadly divided into the scientific and the humanities stream, each of which is composed of different tracks.Footnote ⁴⁰ Course weighting employs numbers from one to seven to establish the importance given to each subject in relation to the student's success in the particular stream and, consequently, in relation to obtaining desirable degrees with good career prospects. For the scientific-stream students, the weighting for French ranges from four to six, right below math and physics (seven) and far above Arabic, weighted at two.Footnote ⁴¹ Aspiring to accede to the prestigious higher education institutions in Morocco, the students of this stream have to cope with French, the language of instruction at the university level. Delineating the systemic organization of the high school helps us see the course weightings as political choices disguised as pedagogical tools that could, and do, orient important sociocultural tendencies. The scientific stream becomes interesting precisely because it constitutes the object of investment by both state and citizens. On the contrary, the humanities stream, leading to higher education in the Arabophone humanities faculties, becomes the default for all poorly performing students. Both the school system and the job market openly devalue this stream, which ends up producing the majority of diplômés chômeurs (unemployed graduates) of Morocco. Certainly, this disciplinary and linguistic hierarchy concerns—if not designates—a particular group of students, those whose ambition for social ascension is dependent on public schooling. It certainly does not concern the upper social strata, which usually attend entirely Francophone and, increasingly, Anglophone private schools and speak French at home.

Given the devaluation of Arabic within the Arabized public school, Moroccan sociolinguists have repeatedly raised questions about the hierarchy of what is neutrally referred to as Arabo-French bilingualism.Footnote ⁴² Surveys of language attitudes continue to reiterate that Moroccan students consider French to be a key instrument to social promotion.Footnote ⁴³ Already in the 1980s, Mussa Chami poignantly asked: “Is Modern Arabic there simply because it would be too shocking if it was not?”Footnote ⁴⁴ More recently, Mohamed Errihani restated the point: “The propagation of French in Morocco indicates a language shift in the making. . .. French is overtaking Arabic, and its hegemony is expected to soon become more widespread despite what the official discourses might claim.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Given that French has been subtly imposed as the indisputable instrument of scholarly promotion, Vermeren declares: “Despite its symbolic and nationalist force, Arabization can be considered as the instrument of a true social apartheid, especially since it remains, to this day, incomplete.”Footnote ⁴⁶ There is no doubt that these evaluations of the language situation in Morocco are perceptive; however, they do not sufficiently account for the strategies pursued by citizens (parents, teachers, and students) that unsettle the social stratification set in motion by the postindependence public school. I contend that it is these strategies—which I call “strategies of circumvention”—that reappropriate and redefine the state-supported hierarchy of useful knowledge (science), linguistic mastery (French), and social stratification. These strategies, I claim, turn the public school into a space of sociocultural bewilderment, a bewilderment that leads to circumstances unanticipated by the Moroccan state.

STRATEGIES OF CIRCUMVENTION

This section narrates the complex involvement of teachers of French with the system as both professionals and parents and compares this involvement with that of other school participants. Through the commentaries of my interlocutors and ethnographic observations, I trace multiple circles of engagement between the Moroccan state and Moroccan citizens. In this light, the expression à deux vitesses, used by Khadija Elgasmi, becomes a metonym not only for linguistic bifurcation in the public school but also for the numerous pedagogical trajectories pursued by school participants in circumvention of this bifurcation.

Khadija Elgasmi sent her younger daughter to a private preschool, for which she needed to pay fees equal to the monthly stipend of a young civil servant: 1300 Moroccan dirhams (dhm), equivalent to US $159.Footnote ⁴⁷ There was an extra 300 dhm fee if she wished her daughter to stay at school on Friday afternoon. The private school does not adjourn from 12:00 to 2:00 like the Moroccan public school nor does it have Friday afternoons off like all institutions in the public sector. This horaire continu (continuous schoolday) imitates the rhythm of private enterprises in Morocco and of chain supermarkets and commercial centers in the more affluent parts of town. The policy of Arabization, according to Mrs. Elgasmi, had made the public school “not the place to send your child.” Even her brother-in-law, a taxi driver, worked both day and night shifts to be able to afford the monthly fee of 500 dhm for a medium-range private school for his son.

Besides her involvement with private education as a parent, Mrs. Elgasmi taught in private schools in addition to her public-school teaching job. “The private school is a different world,” she assured me. “This is where we can do our work.” Gradually, I realized that many teachers I met in public schools were also professionally engaged with private schools. The school principals and the Regional Academy knew about and to an extent tolerated the double engagement. The average salary of a public high school teacher is respectable compared to other professions, but given the rising cost of living in the urban centers and teachers’ efforts to educate their own children in private schools, many considered their double teaching life to be absolutely essential. These financial concerns were not their only motivation; when I followed teachers from the public to the private school, their pleasure of teaching in the latter was apparent, and their interaction with the students was considerably more engaged and lively. It is possible, of course, that the relationship between fee-paying students and teacher differs because of the financial incentives mentioned previously, but I formed the impression that most teachers genuinely enjoyed their interaction with the linguistically more confident students of their private classrooms.

Private schools are noteworthy not only because of their unprecedented expansion but also because of their distinct organization. Contrary to foreign or mission schools, Moroccan private schools are under the control of the Ministry of Education and are officially bound by the national curriculum and its choice of language of instruction. In spite of this, a considerable number of private high schools only offer the scientific stream, and, while they are theoretically bound to follow the national curriculum, they often train students using scientific textbooks imported from France, Belgium, and Canada. These books cost about four times more than Moroccan state textbooks.Footnote ⁴⁸ This effectively means that some private high schools, while nominally Arabized, use French as the language of instruction for their core courses. I became aware of the experiential distance between public and private schools one night while watching a TV program on private schools with a family of a high school student I knew. Three things surprised the student and his siblings the most: the cost of books, the fact that the students spoke French to the reporter, and the school canteen, where lunch was about 40 dhm per meal (an exorbitant cost for the family in question). The children of the family found these images so absurd that they laughed heartily and wondered: “But are these Moroccans?” Ironically, the school that was the focus of the documentary was only twenty minutes away from their house.

The mother of the student whom I had visited expressed skepticism about private schools, where “grades are simply bought.” Yet, although she accused the private school of clientelism, in practice this mother also engaged with private incentives that partly circumvented the public school. Her elder children, like most high school students I knew, spent most of their evenings and weekends in revision classes for their core courses, called murājʿa (revision). The price of revision classes ranged considerably according to the area and the quality of the establishment. In the part of town where I conducted fieldwork, revision centers charged around 150 dhm per month per course, which was a manageable cost for middle-income parents, though it was unattainable for the students who lived in the barārek. In other neighborhoods, the cost of revision could reach 800 dhm per month per course. Parallel schooling was a strategic choice for parents and students who had lost their faith in the public school with its overcrowded classrooms and the frequent absence of teachers. The choice was also the result of parental apprehension that some high school teachers were more likely to award a good grade to students who attended their own revision centers. In the absence of structural meritocracy, families had a number of tactics to promote their children, including rashwa (bribery), which was common in all higher-education institutions that demanded special entrance exams.

Even though educational privatization dates back to pre-Protectorate and Protectorate schooling (the écoles des fils de notables and the collèges musulmans were fee paying, as was, to a degree, the msid Footnote ⁴⁹), it has now become so widely appealing in the urban centers that it can be considered the primary dynamic through which linguistic and social hierarchies get negotiated. The state's rush to privatize education is palpable; casual discussions in teachers’ lounges or the Academy offices revolved around offers to sell formerly public school buildings to private individuals, offers that were initially mediated by inspectors on behalf of the Regional Academy. Needless to say, privatization is simultaneously a Ministry of Education initiative and a World Bank recommendation. However, the private school enables various combinations of social promotion that diverge from the state's intentions; given their different linguistic priorities, private schools also challenge the state's cultural and political messages that are mediated through educational Arabization. My point here is that privatization can be seen in two different ways: as an exacerbation of social stratification along material, disciplinary, and linguistic lines, and as an opportunity for school participants to extricate themselves from the state's ambiguous pedagogical agenda.

The circumvention of the public school was not always motivated by or accomplished through money. During one of our discussions, Ahmed Zirari, the inspector for the French course whose speech framed this article, spoke to me very fondly about a charitable association he had set up, which provided high school students of the barārek with after-school support classes in French. It also assisted schools located in these poor neighborhoods with creating and stocking modest libraries with French books. “By helping them in French,” he said, “I am trying to help them get over a whole inferiority complex and tear down the wall between them and life here in Morocco. It is not a question of professional success, but one of survival” (emphasis added).

The inspector's own educational background was framed by what he narrated as a “charitable act.” Currently in his 60s, inspector Zirari was an Amazigh from the mountainous area of Khenifra, whose nomadic tribe happened to come across a small-town school run by a Belgian teacher during the Protectorate. He had just turned seven years old. He moved from that primary school in the mountains to a high school in a larger town and eventually to the State University of Fes, where he studied French literature. The inspector's urban household was multilingual; while the family communicated in dārija and fuṣḥā with the outer world, his mother and wife spoke tamazight to the children, whereas he addressed them mostly in French so that they would feel comfortable in the language. His personal experience with French education through a Belgian rural school offers an interesting juxtaposition to his comment during the Academy meeting about “nothing [being] free from France anymore.” Inspector Zirari does not imply that the Protectorate had a charitable character, but rather signals the evolving—yet enduring— role of France inside Morocco: from a colonial structure, in which education was a Protectorate responsibility (part of the mission civilisatrice), France has moved to the framework of development as major investor (in domains such as infrastructure and transport, tourism, the pharmaceutical sector, higher education, and others).

The social divisions that undercut the public school and its circumvention by school participants convey the image of not dual but rather multiple educational systems. These systems point to several societies that may co-inhabit the urban space without necessarily relating to each other. This lack of connection between social groups is echoed in the teachers’ frustration and anxiety and in the student laughter directed at the TV documentary on private schools in their town. Their located experiences are illuminating of a more general dynamic whereby a multidirectional Moroccan society mobilizes through different networks. In this multifaceted mobilization, the Arabized public school, as object of social investment, appears to be hollowed. In the next session, I interrogate the meaning of this hollowness against the backdrop of theories of pedagogy, analyses of social class, and assumptions about the role of the state in developing settings.

SOCIOCULTURAL REPRODUCTION?

This article's ethnographic focus on anxiety—vocalized during the teachers’ meeting—and on numerous strategies of circumvention—deployed by school participants—had a twofold purpose: to reveal the cultural and political substratum of the notions of “mastery” and “competence” (in language and in science) and to explore the experience of such notions in the contemporary public school. By probing the history of officially sanctioned knowledge, I elucidated the rearticulation of Morocco's relationship to France in the current context of transition that is labeled as “development.” By tracing the deployment of strategies of circumvention by teachers, parents, and students, I indicated their skepticism toward the state's authority in the domain of education. This skepticism has important implications for the future of the public school and of the Moroccan society at large, an issue that I discuss further.

Teacher comments on academic streams and chances of professional advancement point to the ambiguous connection between Arabization policies at school and the contemporary knowledge economy in Morocco, an economy that favors the mastery of foreign languages over Arabic. While formerly tied to colonial dynamics, the promotion of French today is not a repetition of history per se but a persistence through transformation; in this transformation, the meaning of this language for Moroccan students shifts, and language value is now couched, more than ever, in the idiom of “instrumental necessity.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The instrumentalization of French as language of science and technology entails, of course, a process of forgetting aspects of the colonial past, a process that the school as institution assists. There may be a Marxian farcical element in learning French through a Moroccan Francophone novel in a classroom near the slums.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet, this farce is constantly reappropriated by students, teachers, and parents for a chance of social promotion, the dream of emigration, or the desire for academic excellence for its own sake. For the teachers, French is put in the service of ensuring the social integration of their students and their children; their practices do not suggest a limited view of cultural politics but, on the contrary, indicate an accurate grasp of this politics. These reflections bring me in conversation with an intellectual interest in language ideology especially as this feeds into pedagogical theories. I argue that, notwithstanding its insights, the relevance of the latter for the Moroccan case should be debated, as should its dependence on notions of class structure and its assumption of the fixity of the state.

In postulating language mastery as the outcome of power relations, Dell Hymes and Pierre Bourdieu have memorably opposed an understanding of linguistic competence as the universal practical sense of a language by its speakers, a perspective I readily support.Footnote ⁵² Kathryn Woolard and Bambi Schieffelin have promoted the concept “language ideology” to usefully indicate that the social histories of cultural frames need to be scrutinized if we want to inquire into how “essential meanings about language are socially produced as effective and powerful.”Footnote ⁵³ Turning to Arabo-French bilingualism in Moroccan education, Ahmed Moatassime brings similar thoughts to bear forcefully on the capacity of students to master the linguistic registers in question. Moatassime understands this educational bilingualism as competitive instead of complementary and as suffered rather than mastered. He considers this linguistic competition to be the primal cause for school failure, especially for students of modest backgrounds who have little contact with French in everyday life and, therefore, face classroom bilingualism as an “unsurpassable obstacle.”Footnote ⁵⁴ He connects what he forcefully labels as “savage bilingualism” with “under-development” and suggests that the country's inability to advance may have a lot to do with linguistic tensions that bear on the confidence and creativity of students.Footnote ⁵⁵ His perspective provides a critical re-reading of educational bilingualism that moves us beyond official policy into the lived experience of this officially hushed linguistic competition.

In examinations of language mastery inside schools, it is customary to engage with Bourdieu's vision of education as a “certain kind of objectification in which formally defined credentials or qualifications become a mechanism for creating or sustaining inequalities in such a way that the recourse to overt force is unnecessary.”Footnote ⁵⁶ My contention with Bourdieu is that, while his study of the school's mechanisms for social selection is perceptive, his take on the effectiveness of this mechanism and on people's experience of the institution cannot be generalized. Looking at my interlocutors’ anxiety over the academic and professional future of Moroccan youth, it becomes clear that their awareness of the social rigidity of the school system and its underlying premises does not allow us to see them as taken by the logic of the institution. In this sense, the teachers of this article are not the exemplary subjects of pedagogical ideology as argued in Bourdieu's educational theory: “Teachers constitute the most finished products of the system of production, which it is, inter alia, their task to produce.”Footnote ⁵⁷ On the contrary, I see teachers as uniquely placed evaluators of the system. Through their long experience with the educational structure, they are in a position to notice transformations in the role and meaning of languages for a changing mass experience of education as well as in the validation of this experience in the wider Moroccan society. Hence, the national ideal of Arabization as decolonizing and nationalizing project, which had shaped their own educational experiences, has turned, for their students, into a weakness of adaptation to society.

Nonetheless, despite or precisely through material and social anxiety, teachers become conservative agents in the work of education in at least three ways. First, by accepting that it is through the French language that the current generation will acquire mobility, many teachers do little to promote Arabic at school. Second, in their role as parents and professionals, they orient themselves toward private education, a practice that perpetuates the valorization of French. In this light, even Inspector Zirari's charitable work is ambiguous: while it demonstrates an appreciation of the tensions in which public school is enthralled, it also perpetuates the language hierarchies of the current educational system. Third, in their acceptance of this double juxtaposition of French and Arabic (fuṣḥā), teachers disregard the potential of Moroccan Arabic and Tamazight within the educational institution and maintain the linguistic erasures of the nationalist ideology.

The teachers’ oscillation between the denunciation of the system and the perpetuation of some of its components may point to the critique this ethnographic account can offer to the theoretical fixity of educational research, especially in developing settings that undergo dramatic socioeconomic change. The inherent conservatism of processes of acculturation presented by Bourdieu seems to have evolved out of the thinker's understanding of tradition within what he saw as an unchanging Kabyle society.Footnote ⁵⁸ I propose that such conservatism does not fit with the ideologically ambiguous and socially divisive Arabized school, which no longer allows for a coherent theory of habitus (educational, cultural, or social). It is questionable if it ever did, given the rampant colonial educational fragmentation along social and regional lines. It is reasonable to assume that various participants in educational institutions in Morocco have been observing and comparing their experiences with each other all along; this comparison must have unsettled the idea of cultural and social homogeneity promoted through Arabization, exposing many of the hidden agendas of educational policy.

In addition, a successful work of sociocultural reproduction would mean that this system is unchanging enough that it can be passed on from one generation to the next with a degree of certainty. This leads me to a discussion of the concept of “social class,” which would seem essential for the mapping of continuity. Abdellah Hammoudi traces a transition in Bourdieu's work from ethnological analysis to sociological methodology in his investigation of the effects of colonialism on Algerian workers who migrated to the cities; there, the notion of social class was automatically applied to Bourdieu's observations on the ground.Footnote ⁵⁹ Hammoudi contests the correlation between the mode of adaptation to capitalist economy and a triangular division of the population into classes in the Algerian context. Bourdieu insisted on the idea of social stratification into classes in his seminal work on education in France, a society that appeared to be experienced quite obviously in class terms.Footnote ⁶⁰ In an essay titled “Social Space and the Genesis of Classes,” Bourdieu expresses skepticism toward the Marxist conflation of “theoretical class,” which “allows one to explain and predict the practices and properties of the things classified,” with “empirical class,” or “a group mobilized for struggle.”Footnote ⁶¹ While the first definition only exists in sociological lexicons in the sense of a probability, the latter comes together in practice under the summoning of representatives who “feel authorized to speak in its name.”Footnote ⁶² Bourdieu endows these representatives—among whom he acknowledges the teacher force—with formidable social power.

Contrary to such emphasis, I maintain that, in the context I describe, the explicitness of the system of social hierarchy neither brings about nor reaffirms a heightened class consciousness. Rather, what emerges from the anxiety of teachers is their inability to define class limits and methods of class formation. If we were to define class as “not just consciousness of its separateness but a significant degree of institutional continuity—of family fortunes and attitudes, of education and income,” then we would notice how awkwardly it fits into the accounts that feature in this article.Footnote ⁶³ Having been educated in the public school, these teachers were ensured a stable income and formulated a horizon of aspirations for their children. In spite of this, they find themselves in a position where it is doubtful that they can pass their status on to their children, and even less so to their students, through the same system. Hence, if we took class as a central analytical category in the processes of sociocultural reproduction in Morocco, then we would miss out on the intense generational tensions that undercut the public school. Significantly, this shift of perspective can affect the ways in which we perceive the public school itself: instead of seeing it as a mere passageway between state and society or a mechanism for sociocultural reproduction, we can open the public school up as a public space sui generis, where disjuncture is lived and negotiated.

Shana Cohen's work has perceptively delved into the break between a postindependence trajectory of class formation in Morocco and social stratification in the era of global market integration.Footnote ⁶⁴ One of Cohen's basic arguments is that market liberalization has the power to produce new social groups that, despite their “material and social differences, respond in the same way to the process of market reform.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Their response consists of “restlessness and existential anxiety” and a joint claim to participation in the global economy.Footnote ⁶⁶ Cohen's “global middle class” is an experiential and analytical composition of heterogeneous groups whose main point of resonance lies in their lack of identification with national politics and their feelings of “ambiguity, loss of principle and purpose.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The vital connection Cohen draws between subjectivity and political economy should be central to any discussion of the experience of citizenship in contemporary Morocco. However, seen from the perspective of the public school, it is not obvious that the configuration Cohen calls the “global middle class” would find enough affinities among its members. Influenced by the scene of misrecognition between public school students and their private school counterparts during the TV documentary (“But are they Moroccan?”), I wonder whether what divides this group of young, school-educated Moroccans (language capacity and professional potential) is actually more powerful than what brings it together.

My critique of the analytical potential of a triangular class model points to the profound and numerous divisions that make the idea of social consensus particularly vulnerable. One should not underestimate the more recent accentuation of fragmentation brought about by the newly urbanized inhabitants of the barārek and by the especially precarious professional and social futures of educated urban youth. These groups have even more volatile statuses and are even less likely to reproduce the conditions of their own formation than the educators who featured in this article. Regardless of this complexity, the use of the category “middle class” as an obviously demarcated entity persists among sociologists.Footnote ⁶⁸ Is this category still prominent because of its rootedness in classical sociological models, or is it an echo of a development discourse that links empirical class to the idea of consensus? While theoretically hailed as a potential consolidator of community through its mediating role between the elite and the working classes, the middle space here is too vague and too volatile to be counted upon. Based on the social fragmentation inside schools, this consensus is surely not to be found within the educational sphere.

The opinions and practices of educators and school participants invite me to complicate the delineation of state power and international patronage with regard to education. Both the teachers’ meeting and the historical narrative that framed it suggested that Arabization as state project has suffered from a political ambiguity as to the status of languages through which generations of young Moroccans would integrate into society. This long-standing ambiguity indicates that the contemporary knowledge economy is less the result of external neoliberal forces than it is a virtually uninterrupted (though much transformed) mode of social engineering from the Protectorate onward. In this light, development imperatives in the country, seen at school as a push for privatization, can be viewed as an evolution of French colonial visions into the emerging discourse of global market participation. What is remarkable is that whereas the increasing privatization of schooling may reinforce aspects of the state (such as its elitism), at the same time it distances school participants from the state's nationalist message, which was fully tied to the promotion of Arabization. Hence, the emerging landscape of privatization offers important clues about a changing experience of citizenship (understood here as an everyday negotiation of belonging), whereby privatization as individual engagement redefines some of the state's agendas.

In my analysis of educational consumerism as practice and discourse, I draw from Ritty Lukose's study of higher education in Kerala, India.Footnote ⁶⁹ Having challenged an understanding of privatization as merely a vehicle of market liberalization, Lukose fleshes out how notions of “public” and “private,” while always historically implicated, get reimagined in the current phase of global market integration. When education is debated as a public versus private good, ideas of citizenship and political participation are also reconfigured. During these debates, the state is not simply pitted against the market, with the former being public and the latter private. After all, private schools are facilitated by the state, yet they break with the historical educational role of the state as “a crucial space for the development and enactment of a vigorous political culture.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Taking this back to the Moroccan case, on the one hand, privatization can be tied to the perpetuation of social hierarchy as envisaged by colonial policies, which got reinforced by nationalist and development agendas. On the other hand, the strategies put in place by school participants appropriate various types of privatization in the interest of their social ascension.

Moving away from older forms of social mapping through privatization, school participants question the type of sociocultural reproduction that the independent Moroccan state envisaged. Here, I turn to Cohen's insight about the potential of disenfranchisement and inequality to transform the subjective experience of citizens in relation to the state.Footnote ⁷¹ Symbolically important to the state but pragmatically immersed in privatization, schooling partakes in a sociocultural turmoil full of unintended consequences. How does this inform our understanding of the ramifications of the perceived “hollowness” of public education? The anxiety about and disengagement from the public school suggests that, in the absence of a social project for the Arabophone graduates of this school, social divisions may polarize to such an extent that the already vulnerable notion of a singular society will be irreversibly severed.

EPILOGUE

In this article, I explored the multiple foci through which students, parents, and teachers try to navigate the current knowledge economy, a navigation that testifies to an intense uncertainty around how to envisage the role of the school in the future of the current generation. Long before the substantial mobilization of youth in Moroccan cities during 2011 and 2012, large numbers of unemployed school graduates were spending their days in the street, frequenting the syndicates or demonstrating outside government buildings. Though they launched forceful claims for a chance at social integration based on the meritocratic evaluation of their skills, they were simultaneously cynical about the material relevance of school knowledge. Filtered down to their younger siblings still at school, this cynicism has turned into a disengagement from the school as a socially and symbolically invested space. The affinity between classroom experience and political mobilization confirms that we need to delineate how an elitist colonial framing of knowledge has been mapped, quite comfortably, onto neoliberal ideas of pedagogy imposed on Morocco by organizations such as the World Bank.

Therefore, the call to dispute the depoliticized diagnostics of international development commentators leads to another suggestion: that the intellectual decolonizing of what is taken to be a postcolonial moment of knowledge production and dissemination in Morocco is still in motion. This dynamic process, contingent on the articulation of the relationship between knowledge and schooling in every setting, has to be understood through this setting's culturally and historically specific narrative and through an experiential angle that highlights which aspects of this narrative are more relevant and more urgent than others. This way, we can avoid reifying the conservatism of pedagogical theory and hastily accepting the assertion, confidently promoted by international development policy, that globalization is a new worldmaking gesture. I argue that this location-less and universalizing discourse on globalization seems like a poor theoretical alternative to lived complexity and can obscure our understanding of phenomena such as the direction of the Moroccan knowledge economy and the privatization of education. In opposition to this trend, I insist that we should discuss such “global” phenomena as “projects with cultural and institutional specificities and limitations.”Footnote ⁷²