Alae Aarich: Insights into education from a Moroccan student

I am 17 years old. I live in Kenitra one of the fastest-growing industrial cities in Africa. Every morning I watch white transport vans carry workers to the Atlantic Free Zone, ONCF trains carry commuters to Rabat, and then I go to school. I sit down. And I slowly disappear.

Not literally. My name is on the register. My body is in the chair. But the version of me that is curious, motivated, and ready to engage with the world? That one checked out around 10 a.m., somewhere between the third hour of passive note-taking and the fourth period of mandatory silence.
I want to be clear: I am not writing this because I hate school or because I think education does not matter. I am writing this because I think it matters so much that we cannot keep pretending the current system is delivering it.

A record budget, a familiar feeling

When the government announced the 2026 education budget nearly 100 billion dirhams, a national record  I saw it shared everywhere. People celebrated. And I understand why: that number represents real commitment and real political will.But money poured into a broken structure does not fix the structure. It funds it.

The problem I am describing is not about missing textbooks or crumbling buildings. It is about the design of the school day itself. The philosophy underneath the schedule. Right now, that philosophy says: keep students contained, measure their compliance, reward memorisation, and call that education.

The infrastructure of ambition is there. What is missing is the courage to change what happens inside the classroom.

The professor who described my school in 1968

There is a concept I came across while studying outside of school hours  because that is where I do most of my real learning  called the “Banking Model of Education.” It was developed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in 1968.

Freire described a system where the teacher deposits knowledge into the student like money into a bank account. The student’s job is not to think, question, or create just to store and reproduce on demand.
I read that and felt something uncomfortable: he was describing my school. In 2026. In Morocco. A diagnosis written almost sixty years ago, still perfectly accurate.

What ten hours a day at school does to you

Research in educational psychology is consistent: the adolescent brain does not maintain high-quality attention for eight to ten consecutive hours. Concentration degrades sharply after 90 minutes of focused effort without a genuine break. After that, what looks like learning is mostly performance  students going through the motions, waiting for the bell.
Countries that have reformed their education systems understood this. More hours does not mean more education. Sometimes it means less.
In Kenitra, we have no shortage of hours. We have a shortage of what those hours are actually doing to our minds.

We are teaching ourselves- at midnight

Here is something adults need to hear plainly: the most motivated students I know are not disengaged from learning. They are disengaged from school. There is a difference.

After dinner, sometimes after ten or eleven at night, many of us open our laptops and start the second school day. The real one. We watch lectures online. We use AI tools. We build skills in coding, design, and entrepreneurship because we understand the job market waiting for us will not care about our ability to memorise historical dates.

This parallel education is remarkable. It is also a damning verdict on the official one. A system that forces its most motivated students to build a shadow curriculum just to stay relevant is not succeeding. It is being quietly replaced by teenagers, in their bedrooms, at midnight.

What is working?

I want to be honest: my school is starting to change. After students — including me — petitioned the administration, the school announced a programme to integrate student-led clubs and extracurricular activities into the school week.
What I find most significant is not the clubs themselves  it is how the change happened. Students organised, made a case, and were heard. That process taught me more than most of my timetabled subjects have.

What I am actually asking for

I am not asking for easier exams or shorter school days. I am asking for school days designed around how adolescent brains actually function. I am asking for a curriculum that includes the digital and creative skills that every employer in the Atlantic Free Zone two kilometres from my school  is currently importing from abroad because Moroccan graduates do not have them.

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I am asking for a school that treats me as an asset in development, not a risk to be managed.
Morocco has signed international commitments to quality education. It has produced reform documents and allocated a record budget. The infrastructure of ambition is there. What is missing is the courage to change what happens inside the classroom.

A final word

I will sit in a classroom again tomorrow morning. My name will be called. I will answer. Present.
But presence without purpose is not education. It is patience. And Morocco cannot afford to spend one hundred billion dirhams a year teaching its youth to wait.

The factories in our free zones are waiting for engineers and problem-solvers. The economy is waiting for the generation that grows up inside these schools. And that generation – my generation –  is waiting for a school system that finally decides to meet us where we are: curious, capable, and tired of being treated like we are not. 

We are not ghosts. We just need a school that can see us.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Maghrebi.org. Alae Aarich is a Moroccan high school student based in Kenitra, currently working towards her Science baccalaureate and planning to study finance and accounting.

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