A study of the impact of citizenship education in Morocco

Abstract

Global changes taking place in today’s world have brought about an unprecedented crisis in citizenship values. For instance, violence, conflict and radicalization have become rampant in our society. Such crisis has brought to the limelight the role of education in sensitizing students about their rights and duties in order to promote peace, tolerance and mutual respect. In Morocco, educational reforms have given much importance to citizenship education in the belief that it can help raise students’ awareness about their rights and duties, anchor them to their communities, and provide them with the knowledge and skills necessary for active participation in society. The National Charter for Education and Training and the Higher Council for Education, Training and Scientific Research have created a roadmap for citizenship education. This study aims to investigate the impact of such attempts to train good citizens. The participants are 73 semester-two students of the department of English from the faculty of humanities, Chouaib Doukkali University. The main data collection tool is questionnaires. The data obtained are fed into SPSS to generate frequencies besides identifying main themes obtained from answers to open-ended questions. Findings show that the impact of such educational reforms is rather limited. While the majority of students expressed their feeling of belonging to their community as well as an accepted level of awareness of their rights and duties, they failed to act on the self-reported qualities of a good citizen. Such low level of engagement in their community affairs betrays weak links between students and their communities. In light of these findings, several recommendations are made to improve citizenship education and reduce the gap between the goals of national educational reforms and their actual implementation in schools. One such recommendation is that textbooks need to emphasize critical thinking and analysis so that students are empowered to become critical thinking global citizens and agents of change.