Students on the March

            Last week, a series of student protests across the country nudged Morocco. The impetus for these protests was a new online grading system from the Ministry of Education. In this system, as I understood it, teachers will enter test grades directly into the program, which will then compile student grades. Many students (and, indeed, many teachers) were bothered that this leaves no place for intangibles like student participation and behavior. Additionally, since this service was online and accessed by password many students were worried that their parents would have access to their grades.

            You’ll notice there were two extremely dissimilar elements to the protest against this online system. On the one hand, there were students arguing that their grade should be based on more than just a flawed testing system, on the other, there were students arguing that parents shouldn’t have access to their students’ grades. This, of course, widened the popularity of the protest, as both slackers and high achievers had something to complain about. Actually, having talked with some other volunteers about the protests in their towns, I found that different protests emphasized different things. I didn’t hear too much complaining about parental access (admittedly the kids I talked to are my regular students, all of whom are obviously taking extra English hours with me, so they are high achievers who probably don’t have too much to hide), but heard a lot about the terrible new grading system, but other groups apparently had different emphases. One volunteer said so far as her town was concerned it was a protest of slackers. They actually didn’t want to see participation and behavior added back in! In my town I did see a number of the slackers participating, but I also saw many of the hardest working kids.

            Many places also added additional complaints to the general protest. This is where I thought my kids made their strongest appeals. My kids wanted to see the leaky roofs to their classrooms fixed. They wanted to see the bathroom at their school repaired. They wanted more and better trained teachers hired. They wanted attendance to be made mandatory so that richer students couldn’t just study with private tutors then come in and ace tests (I didn’t know that was a thing until they told me about it). They also waxed a little into conspiracy theory territory; one group said they feared that hackers would break into the website and change grades.

            Although they didn’t attend school for most of the week, from what I saw students kept peaceful and organized. My regulars still kept coming to my classes, so they didn’t make it a holiday. One of the days they tried to march to the provincial capitol, but were escorted back by the gendarmerie a few miles out of town. A different day (the first) I was in the Khenifra on a failed attempt to visit the local offices of the Education Ministry. Although there was a huge crowd of protesters outside the office they left room for pedestrians to get by about their business. It was the gendarmes guarding the door, rather than the students, who prevented my meeting.

            From what I’ve heard the protests didn’t change much. Our regional deputy of the minister did come to town to talk with my students, but it seems the protests died across the country without much change. As a mass the protests didn’t have much effect probably because of their diffuse (and sometimes contrary) messages and the fact that many of the students have much more invested in getting back to class than their administrators do. However, I thought it showed great gumption and national level awareness from so many high school students to organize this series of protests, and evidences an interest in taking control of and reforming their education to suit their needs. As one of the protesting students said to me, Morocco’s youth have many great abilities and talents, and they’re just aching for the opportunity to use them.