Art education in Moroccan primary and secondary public schools tends to be more often alien to Morocco’s impressively rich artistic and cultural heritage. The classroom activities, which should be designed to pique students’ curiosity and spark their interest in the deep-rooted history of their homeland, the ancestral traditions of their forefathers and the innovative expressions of contemporary Moroccan artists, promote, in lieu, an insipid and tedious rote learning of art.
And it makes me wonder: what’s the point of teaching art in the first place? This reductionist approach has so far failed to recognise the transformative potential of art as a path to understanding the self, the other, and the collective memory we share as a nation. Art classes are meant to be, in my view, hothouses for potential talents where beauty, creativity and human experiences and aspirations, past and present, are celebrated.
In a land where stories are abundant at every corner, one cannot help but question, let alone deplore, the absence of meaningful connections between schools and the spaces where these narratives are flourishing. The museums hold treasures that belong to all Moroccans and yet only the elite few have access to these artistic repositories. These institutions are as inaccessible to most young learners as the intricate symbolism behind the artefacts they contain.
In the same vein, no matter how persistent and persevering Moroccan artists are in their endeavour to voice the complexities of our present while honouring the echoes from our past, they remain regrettably and almost deliberately discarded and unspoken of in classrooms where none seems to be full of enough vim and vigour to venture beyond formulaic lessons.
This disconnect is not to be considered a sheer oversight but an utter failure, a misconception about art education that will have unspeakable consequences. To teach art without connecting students to their heritage is to run the risk of stripping away that heritage of meaning in the future.
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The museum, far from being a static collection of objects, is a space of encounter and reflection, a classroom in itself, where students might recognise the fingerprints of their ancestors in every tile and tapestry. The artist, often consigned to oblivion, could be an educator, a guide, and a source of inspiration. Yet neither the museum nor the artist is given a meaningful place in the Moroccan curriculum of art education.
What is at stake is not merely the quality of artistic instruction but the very way young Moroccans perceive their role within the continuum of their culture. Partnerships between schools, museums, and artists are not luxuries but necessities.
They would allow students to see that art is not an abstraction, nor is it confined to the pages of history books. It is alive, evolving, and deeply tied to the world they inhabit. Imagine a classroom where the study of calligraphy leads to a workshop with a master artisan, or where lessons on abstraction culminate in a visit to a contemporary gallery. Such experiences would awaken in students a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves.
To integrate Morocco’s artistic ecosystem into education is to sow the seeds of cultural awareness. It is to teach students not only to observe art but understand its language and even see themselves reflecting on it.
This is not about preserving heritage in a static sense; it is about renewing it, allowing each generation to revisit it, redefine it, and ensure that it remains “alive and kicking”. I am absolutely convinced and genuinely confident that promoting the dialogue between past and present and boosting the interaction between artists and students will definitely secure the future of our cultural identity.
