IN TWO SPEEDS (À DEUX VITESSES): LINGUISTIC PLURALISM AND EDUCATIONAL ANXIETY IN CONTEMPORARY MOROCCO

Abstract

AbstractNotwithstanding its promotion as a vehicle for the decolonization and modernization of knowledge in Morocco, the policy of Arabization has been caught in an ongoing competition with the pedagogical visions of the French Protectorate—visions that have been recycled by nationalist and international development agendas. This competition has subtly classified the sciences and the humanities into Francophone and Arabophone disciplines, respectively, at a moment when national development is understood as technological advancement. School participants endure this linguistic, disciplinary, and, effectively, social hierarchy and put their awareness of the system at the service of its circumvention. The anxiety of teachers over the future of state-educated youth indicates that the legitimacy of the school itself has become highly doubted. This article approaches both the public school and its relationship to knowledge through a historically informed ethnographic lens, arguing that centralized theories of pedagogy, the sociological category of class, and the assumed dichotomy between state agendas and international patronage are unsatisfactory frames for the interpretation of the phenomena in question.