Photo Credit: Rachel Berets.
The following article was written by Rachel Berets, an alumna of the SIT: Field Studies in Journalism and New Media fall 2019 semester. Her piece was published in Al-Fanar Media on March 2, 2020.
RABAT—For three years as a young public-school teacher in Morocco, Abdelghani Erraki taught physics and chemistry in French without a hitch. But in 1983, following a wave of Arab nationalism, the Moroccan government decided to change the language of instruction in science, math, and technical classes from French to Arabic.
Erraki was given two weeks of training from the Ministry of Education and was expected to begin teaching completely in Arabic at the start of the school year.