Satirizing Education in Crisis

Abstract

The fifth chapter analyzes the use of parody and satire to depict education in Mohamed Nedali’s Grâce à Jean de la Fontaine! (Thanks to Jean de la Fontaine!) and Yacine Adnan’s Hūt Marūk (Hot Maroc). Nedali’s novel describes the satiric misadventures of a teacher-in-training who, upon finding himself surrounded by incompetency at the school where he works, learns to play along with absurdity rather than fight it. Hūt Marūk, in a similarly satiric tone, describes a young man who embodies the new kind of author produced by a failing education system: a comments section troll on an online blog. These novels offer a dramatic departure from the earnest striving heroes examined in the fourth chapter. They poke fun at education, exaggerating the foibles of incompetent administrators, skewering teachers who know nothing about their subject, and presenting the classroom as a space of meaningless failed communication. These narratives do more than point a literary finger at current political controversies and educational failings. They bring the entire educational institution into question through their clear refusal to ever be taught to future generations in the classroom