Taroudante- Only 5% of primary students in Morocco can read in French. The statistic was recently announced in an interview with Menara last week, Abdelaâdim Guerrouj, Minister Delegate to the Minister of Education in charge of vocational training.
Referring to studies conducted in this field, the minister said that “all these studies show that at the end of the sixth grade (primary school), only 16% of students are able to read and write and a lower rate of only 5% read in French.”
The announced foreign language learning results come despite large budget appropriations by the government for the educational system.
According to the minister, the Ministries of national education and vocational training alone “absorb nearly 26% of the general budget of the state, in addition to the resources devoted to higher education and other sectors of the system of education and training”
The minister said that if these efforts had been exploited wisely, the educational system in the kingdom would have yielded beneficial results.
“If one had to measure these efforts in relation to GDP, we would end up at very high levels,” he said.
While Guerrouj stressed the “importance of mastering language, either Arabic or French, as the basic tool in order to accumulate knowledge,” Lahcen Daoudi, Morocco’s Minister of Higher Education, believes that English is the key to improving the quality of the educational system in Morocco.
The minister of higher education had said previously “French is no longer relevant” and “Arabic is important only because it is the language of the Quran,” and believes that English, the language of scientific research, is the solution in Morocco’s education system.
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