At a time when the triumph, under the aegis of globalization, of a post-literacy training which seems to sacrifice the achievements of our plural identity built through a laborious historical journey, we plead for a freely chosen and assumed citizenship. Guarantee of a future Morocco.
But this attachment to this new citizenship cannot dispense us from the necessary reconciliation with our plural history. A history which integrates the cultural contributions of all, Arab-Islamic, Amazigh, but also the contributions of all these other components as diverse as each other: Saharo-Hassan, African, Andalusian, Hebrew and Mediterranean. A reconciliation that involves getting rid once and for all of this sum of retrograde thoughts and these patterns of ethnic or religious intolerance. Schemes that lodge at the bottom of our collective mind.
Many of us relied on our education system to change minds. For a long time, it was not. Our school programs inculcated, especially in our little ones, crooked formations which did not help them to revisit their past and to assume it in a lucid way. Not being armed with a critical mind, our young people only granted minor interest to their national history.
If not none, as they are currently living, since all day long, they are more and more drunk by these stories that abound in social networks where the false often wins over the truth. Without any discernment. Discernment that can only come from a healthy education. An education that gives meaning.
In this gloomy picture, a gleam seems to appear with the recent introduction in our primary school textbooks of elements of Amazigh culture and history as well as of Jewish culture and history. The latter, certainly a minority, but which at the beginning of the last century represented no less than 10% of the Moroccan population.
A minority which has nonetheless played an important role in the economic, diplomatic and cultural fields of our country. This vast curriculum reform project, which started the day after the establishment of the 2011 constitution, mobilized a whole team of national education inspectors to design a document prescribing the urgent changes to be made – in particular in the teaching of history and geography and in citizenship education – from September 2012, in the curricula.
Action continued in 2014 by removing from these school programs anything that was in contradiction with the principles of the constitution. New educational schemes have been worked on in depth to take into account all the elements of the national heritage: Amazigh, Hebrew, Andalusian, African and Hassani. Elements of heritage that belong to all Moroccans
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