The Moroccan National Syndicate of Higher Education, Nabila Moneib Casablanca – Raja Battaoui The Moroccan National Syndicate of Higher Education said skipping education has spread on a dangerous scale among Moroccan children either due to schools being far from their homes or due to the lack of an infrastructure that would absorb additional classes.
Sources inside the syndicate warned that: “The situation is disastrous” and called on the government to fully grasp its responsibilities.
The sources stated that main cities get a lion’s share of the educational map while suburbs suffer a bleak situation very close to that of remote villages. They also confirmed that girls are more prone to leave school at an early age, as percentages reach 90 percent in some regions while in some areas children do not enroll in schools in the first place.
The Syndicate discussed what it considered as structural obstacles that increase the phenomenon of skipping education; the most important being the lack of an integrated infrastructure and lack of human resources in addition to the incapacity in both rural and urban regions equally, to accept more students. The Syndicate mentioned that less than 30 percent of female students in rural areas finish their education to the preparatory stage, less than 10 percent of them pass secondary school exams, and less than 5 percent are able to join university.
The sources also stated that poverty remains the major factor in depriving thousands of children from studying in addition to an educational policy that doesn’t take into consideration social differences which has reflected negatively on the quality and kind of education provided to young children. In this concern Nabila Moneib, a member of the administrative committee in the National Syndicate for Higher Education, said: “The educational system in Morocco proved its failure with figures of 40 percent of students who continued their public education reached the secondary stage, only 10 percent get a university degree, while less than 1 percent obtain a PhD.\"
Moneib stated the percentage of illiteracy in Morocco did not have any significant decreases despite the countering illiteracy and irregular education programs launched by the government. She pointed out that the percentage reaches 90 percent in some areas and that Morocco now witnesses the phenomenon of illiterate young adults who leave school early and do not benefit from any other educational system. She clarified that the percentage of illiteracy varies from one area to the other and called for a national debate over education to discuss the aggravating problems, especially related to educational programs and the geographic division of the educational map.
The Administrative Committee member stressed that some educational institutions are dangerously overcrowded in a way that negatively affects the future of education in Morocco. She also referred to the fact that the most apparent feature of the failing rush education program approved by the government is that it was not able to deal with the real problems of the educational and formation system in addition to institutionalising a number of practices that contributed to destroying the infrastructure of Moroccan education.