What the numbers don’t say
Amina’s class: Education – Pioneer Schools. Change has the face of a seven-year-old child.
She’s seven years old, not all her teeth, and a way of looking you in the eye that makes you feel like you’re being interrogated. Amina wants to become a police officer. “Not just to catch bad guys. » She wants to provide this clarification herself, with a little air of someone who doesn’t appreciate shortcuts. But because, she says with the seriousness of a child who has thought about the question, “It’s a job that requires strength and courage.” From her height of four feet, she already has strength.
Amina is in the second year of primary school. She does theater… and it shows. She speaks with an aplomb that would make many adults who speak in front of microphones jealous. She attributes her eloquence without hesitation to her teacher: “She encourages me to speak, to go on stage, to believe in myself and in my dreams. »
When asked what has changed since her school became a pioneer, Amina thinks for a second, then she answers with the precision of a child who has observed: “First of all, we no longer have a blackboard or chalk. We have an overhead projector. I prefer to see lessons like this, in color and light. And the teacher teaches us math by singing. I learn much better that way. School has become very pleasant. » In colors and light…. You have to be a child to describe an educational reform with such accuracy.
She has 9s and 10s, Amina. She is proud of it and she says it, without false modesty. But a little pout crosses her face when she concedes that she was only third in her class this term. The pout lasts a few seconds, no more. Then she raises her head, glances at Khadija, her mother whose eyes shine with love and pride, and announces with panache: “But the year is not over. I will be first in my class.”
Amina has an older brother. He’s in college. And he is, she confides with a smirk, “a little jealous”. Its establishment has not yet switched to the pioneer college program. He waits his turn. He is waiting for English lessons, new learning methods, extracurricular activities, etc. This school that his little sister describes to him in the evening at home. This gap between two siblings, two establishments, two speeds, says something important: the reform is progressing, but it is not yet everywhere. And those who wait know it.
In color and light
4,626 pioneer schools. More than 700 colleges. Figures that could have remained abstract if Amina did not exist. If she didn’t use all her ambition to give them a face, a voice.
Thousands of children are experiencing a new way of learning. In color and light, as she says. With teachers who accompany them on the path that leads them to their dreams, dreams that deserve to be taken seriously.
There is still a way to go. The Moroccan social elevator, which has long been broken down and sometimes still seized up, is currently being repaired. Not all students have their pioneer school yet. Not all Amina in the country have a theater stage and a picture in color and light yet, but something has started… and must continue.
