5 - Satirizing Education in Crisis

Summary

Inside the fictional classroom of Moha Souag's short story “Monsieur le Directeur” (1999), chaos reigns: lessons are so mind-numbing that students rebel by throwing rocks at their teachers, and in the hallways, an employee has been assigned the task of carrying an administrator to his car to keep his shoes clean. Scenes like these are a dramatic departure from the classrooms attended by the earnest, striving heroes of al-Faṣl al-akhīr [The Last Chapter] or Les coquelicots de l’Oriental [The Mountains Forgotten by God]. While previous works on Moroccan education criticized the school, they still described learning itself as a serious endeavor and showed education to be a form of self-improvement and social promotion. Despite Coquelicots's excoriation of Arabization, for example, the text still featured a protagonist able to travel and improve his economic circumstances through education. While demonstrating Aisha's exceptional status, al-Faṣl al-akhīr continually highlighted how she benefited from her education. Abdellatif Laâbi's Le fond de la jarre [The Bottom of the Jar] unsparingly dissected the identity crises caused by French colonial education, but nonetheless devoted equal space to the protagonist's affection for the French language and the pride he took in his academic successes. The last two decades have seen the emergence of a different mode of writing: satires and parodies of education from Moroccan authors, including Moha Souag, Fouad Laroui, Mohamed Nedali, Yacine Adnan, and many others. They use their work to poke fun at education, exaggerating the foibles of incompetent administrators, skewering teachers who know nothing about their subject, and presenting the classroom as a space of meaningless failed communication.

On the surface, the causes of this turn to satire are not difficult to identify. The idea that Moroccan education is in crisis garners a general consensus, as is demonstrated by alarmist newspaper headlines and discussions in the media. Literary portraits of incompetent administrators, if one reads between the lines, seem to point to these broader institutional failings. Satiric ideas of meaninglessness (especially in francophone novels) often serve as scathing commentary on Arabization as a policy. Such is the case in Fouad Laroui's “L’étrange affaire du cahier bounni” [The Strange Affair of the Bounni Notebook], a short story in which an entire school year grinds to a halt because nobody understands the standard Arabic word (bounni) that describes the color of students’ required notebooks.