There’s an interesting spat going on at the moment over language and education. Six weeks ago there was an education conference in Casablanca called Le Chemin de la Réussite. It was organized by the Zakoura Foundation, and had a fine line-up of speakers and participants. It was an excellent event, as I can clearly see … More Of Bald Men and Combs
A short note to accompany a photograph of a coffee-pot I bought last week. I am delighted with it, never having seen a Richard Wright coffee-pot before. This one stands about ten inches tall to the top of its finial, has the characteristic Wright insulating grommet in the handle, and the stamped Wright mark followed … More Coffee – the Wright Stuff
Last week I was in Azrou, and spent a morning walking up to Tioumliline. It’s a fairly short walk, out of town along a new, rather raw, stretch of the Midelt road with trucks roaring past, until you take the turning to Ain Leuh, a narrow strip of frayed asphalt that snakes enticingly into the … More Of Monks and Cedars
Much excitement in the Moroccan press this week about Education First’s 2013 English Proficiency Index (EPI) which sees Morocco apparently blossoming as an anglophone country. Akhbar al-Yawm published a front-page article entitled: “Bad news for the francophone in Morocco … the English language is moving ahead”. The Arabic-speaking daily said “a report on English Proficiency by Education First has … More Morocco joins l’Anglophonie. Possibly
The public service now runs at 577,691 jobs. In 2012 there were 560,000 students at Moroccan universities. So if the diplômés chômeurs had their way, even with Morocco’s low completion rate (9.2% in 4-year institutions in 2010) the public service would grow like Topsy, boosted by rising literacy (now only 56%) and a rising baccalaureate … More Graduate Employment: Pédaler dans la vide (2)
He used to stage sit-ins in front of the parliament building with other unemployed university graduates … after the boots of the police trampled him and his back was almost broken under their clubs, he stopped protesting, convinced that jobs were handed out only through personal connections and corruption and not by protesting and staging … More Graduate Employment: Pédaler dans la vide (1)
Last April I wrote here about teapots, and the trade in silver between Manchester and Fes (Mancunian Silver). Since writing that piece I have learned a lot more (and already blush slightly at some of the over-simplifications and errors I made there!). I have done this partly through my own research in British sources; but … More Manchester and Teapots Again
Literacy is – and should be – a constant preoccupation in Morocco. But there is underlying this preoccupation, the constant question of what people are to do with their literacy once they have it. It isn’t, after all, an end in itself. That dismissive expression ‘signature-literacy’ describes the ability to write one’s name but little … More Thanks for the Memory
Today the clocks go back, or so we are led to believe. Every business in Morocco has patches installed on its computers which will take us all, on the coat-tails of Europe, back to GMT in the small hours of tomorrow morning. Unless of course there are any more horo-political surprises in store for us … More Taking Tock to the forest
A year or so back there was a short news story in the Moroccan press about Indian labourers being hired to work in the Tangier Free Zone – because they spoke English. This small vignette echoes research commissioned by the British Council from Euromonitor, which found a wage premium of 16% or so for English-speakers … More A vote with the tongue for a less class-bound society
Martin Rose 