“Though the Moroccan school recorded an increase in the enrollment rate of 99.7% during the 2018-2019 school year for children between 6 and 11 years old, this figure hides a painful reality which results in school dropout”, underlined the National Human Rights Council (CNDH) in its annual report, aimed at “redefining priorities to consolidate the effectiveness of rights”. Worse still, this constitutional institution speaks of a hemorrhage which reached 331,558 students during the 2021-2022 school year, i.e. an increase of more than 27% compared to 2019-2020. The fact remains that last year saw the launch of a new education reform project according to a 2022-2026 roadmap, at a time when the education system is still suffering from structural problems diagnosed by several reference documents. The strategic vision of the 2015-2030 reform had already confirmed that the education system suffered from problems related to overstaffing, school dropouts, and endemic violence in and around schools. Added to this is a weak pedagogical support, in addition to a scientific production which is becoming exceedingly rare in Moroccan universities. In addition, in primary education, statistics show a great disparity in terms of access according to gender and place of residence.
In its report, the Council stressed the importance of the success of the strategy consisting in generalizing primary education in order to improve the education and training system as a whole and to reduce the number of school dropouts, except that for the time being, this strategy has not succeeded in overcoming the challenges of generalization, because of the basic infrastructure. The other challenge consists in overcoming all forms of disparities. For CNDH, enjoyment of the right to education suffers from the duality of the education system and from the imbalance between the public and private sectors. “ The privatization of education has increased in the face of the difficulties encountered by public schools. Privatization is gradually changing the national education system towards the consecration of a dichotomy: private school for well-to-do families versus public school for the poor and vulnerable classes ”, underlines the document. This duality remains the dominant characteristic of many economic and social rights. It poses real challenges in terms of equity, quality, and equal opportunities for all students from different strata of society. This duality calls into question more than ever the role of the public school as a social ladder and as a mechanism for correcting inequalities, says the document.
Mohamed CHAOUI
