Non formal education in Morocco - giving a chance to a second-chance-system

Résumé du document

In Morocco, hundreds of thousands of children aged between eight and fiteen years, boys and girls, either have never been to school or dropped out from it, too soon. They live in very difficult conditions, wandering in the streets, or working early in farms or in the city. This sad phenomenon is the first and principal source of illiteracy in the country, and constitutes a huge obstacle to economic growth and social development.

Decreasing illiteracy, giving a second chance to children in age of schooling, is therefore a priority that results from a global and deep vision we do have of the Moroccan educational landscape. We have been involved in the International Convention for Children's Rights, we have engaged in the Millennium Development Goals, and been part of the Education for All Policy.

Non Formal Education has come as a proposed alternative to this critical situation. It aims at reinserting children in the economic cycle and training them at being good citizens. It was launched in 1997, but the results have not been positive enough and the idea has not appealed to enough moroccans, even though a tremendous number of them actually need it. This memorandum is above all a call for a much more effective design and implementation of the non-formal education policy in Morocco.

Extraits

[...] Decreasing illiteracy, giving a second chance to children in age of schooling, is therefore a priority that results from a global and deep vision we do have of the Moroccan educational landscape. We have been involved in the International Convention for Children's Rights, we have engaged in the Millennium Development Goals, and been part of the Education for All Policy. By writing the National Charter of Training and Education we have confirmed once again our will to eradicate illiteracy before 2015 and reduce primary school drop-out rates to 2%. Non Formal Education has come as a proposed alternative to this critical situation. [...]

[...] Non Formal Education needs a final deadline: it should be considered as a mission limited in a time frame that should be decided upon in a more realistic way; 10 years is a minimum, not a maximum to achieve our mission. We do not have access to how the reinserted students did after non formal education. There is an urgent need for the creation of a transparent, well- funded commission specialized in statistical follow-up of the children in non-formal education. [...]

[...] The problem is that there has not been a follow-up of these reinserted students, especially in formal education; it is indeed important for policy makers to know whether that reinsertion proved fruitful or not. This issue will be tackled in the recommendations part. Non - Formal education in Morocco consists in adapting to the different conditions in which young Moroccans live in, and make sure these conditions are no longer obstacles to their academic development. For instance, a non- formal school would give children a week day instead of Saturday because that day would be the market day which the rural children must attend. [...]

[...] Non-formal education is going to take time, money, and much efforts before it actually reveals fruitful. However, one cannot trade education for any of these elements. Indeed, non formal education will actually help improve such very bad results as those we have seen previously. Students with difficulties are everywhere in both rural and urban areas. They cannot improve their academic level because of different reasons, depending on which social background they come from. Moroccan policy makers have to be more realistic; As the scientist Alfred Korzybski said, map is not the territory” . [...]

[...] (My translation, Conseil Superieur de l'Enseignement, PNEAD, 2008) How do such results give credit to non-formal education One would think that if formal education is currently struggling, it would not make sense to start a new non-formal system of education in parallel. Such a decision would only imply more money being spent, more time to think of the way NFE would be implemented, and, of course, more efforts to do the follow up and assess the outcome of such a policy. [...]