Colonial vs Colonized Counter-Hegemonies: Two Vistas of Moroccan Educational Models

Abstract

Both France and Spain used schooling as a vehicle in service of colonization during the Protectorate era in Morocco, whereas Moroccans retaliated with counter-hegemonic tools to resist and interrogate imposed educational models in order to implement their oppositional agendas. Thus, the paper is threefold: it attempts to revisit and sketch out both colonial policies in education with their ramifications, while outlining and analyzing their strengths and limitations. The study also seeks to investigate how Moroccans establish resistance movements to react to the newly-imposed colonial hegemonies, such as free schools and reformed traditional Qur’anic schools (Msids), discussing their goals, structures, success and failure. Finally, the paper explores colonial education as a site of interaction or “contact zones” between French and Spanish colonizers and elite Moroccan Muslims and Nationalists who sought to counter the processes of acculturation, marginalization and subalternization. The study covers the Moroccan schooling system from 1912 to 1956. The study dwelled on the congruity of education as an ideological apparatus to shape identity and/or dominate in a battlefield over power between the Protectorate powers and the Moroccan nationalists, who made use of different discourses as an instrument of power. This essay unravels some conclusions that both French and Spanish Protectorates utilized different vistas to establish and sustain their hegemonies through education and instruction, such as Franco-Berber schools and Spanish-Arab/Spanish-Jewish schools respectively. While, Moroccan Muslims and nationalists countered the former hegemonies through creating a free-school system and reforming traditional Qur´anic schools.