Trois langues au lycée — Three Languages at School

The break, and why it has not been fixed

Lesson 92 described the arrangement; this lesson is what it does to one person, and it is worth laying out because the mechanism is specific rather than a general complaint about schools. **What happens.** Following arabisation policies from the 1960s and 1970s, Moroccan school teaching in most subjects — including mathematics and the sciences — moved into Arabic. University teaching in scientific, technical and medical fields largely remained in French. A student therefore learns the vocabulary and the reasoning of their subject in one language for twelve years, then meets it in another on arrival at university, often with a bridging year that is widely agreed to be insufficient. The attrition is real and concentrated in exactly the technical fields the economy most needs. This is 'la rupture', and Leïla is right that everybody knows about it. **Why it persists.** Not through inattention — Morocco has reformed its education system repeatedly, including a 2019 framework law expanding French-medium teaching of scientific subjects at secondary level, which was itself contested in parliament. The difficulty is that every available option costs something. Teaching science in French at school means a generation of teachers trained in Arabic must switch, and it reopens the question of why the national language cannot carry science. Keeping Arabic throughout and translating university teaching means producing an entire technical literature and cutting students off from international work. Keeping the present arrangement means accepting the attrition. And adding English, which is now happening, introduces a fourth variable before the third is settled — which is Alex's closing line, and it is a real criticism made by Moroccan educators themselves. **What is argued about.** Whether French-medium science teaching serves students or entrenches the advantage of families who already speak French at home — the same objection lesson 84 raised in Senegal, and it is the strongest one. Whether arabisation was a necessary assertion of sovereignty or a decision whose costs fell on the poorest. Whether English should replace French rather than be added to it. Whether Amazigh, official since 2011, should have a place in this at all, and it currently has very little. These are argued in Moroccan newspapers continuously and in both languages. **This course takes no position.** What it will say is the thing a learner is well placed to notice: the problem is not that Moroccan students are bad at languages. Leïla moved between Arabic and French and became an engineer; the students who dropped out were not less capable but less cushioned. If you find your own three years of French hard going, it is worth remembering that you are doing it voluntarily, in your own time, with nothing resting on it.