Towards the Diagnosis of Moroccan Education Reforms: An Analytical Approach to the Incoherent Linguistic Bilingualism

Abstract

Since independence, the Moroccan education reforms have failed to establish a coherent linguistic policy and reach a consensus over it. This paper examines the historical, political, and socio-cultural considerations underlying the inconsistency in the language of instruction in Moroccan classrooms, with a focus on the latest reforms. The first part provides a chronology of the improvisation marking the education reforms marking the postcolonial linguistic policies. The second part adopts an analytical approach to reveal the inexpressible reasons underlying such policy of incoherence and imbalanced bilingual policies between Arabization and ‘Francisation’. The analysis shows that the incoherence marking the language of instruction is not purely linguistic but rather politically, economically, and culturally driven. The linguistic policy is one of assimilation, not complementarity. The paper critically highlights the attempt in the current education reform to shift from this imbalance to bilingual policies to more multilingual ones via a policy of language rotation in the classroom.