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Cat in Rabat has a provocative post<\/a> about literacy and habits of reading in Morocco. She relates that on a recent visit to Spain with her husband, she was shocked to see that nearly everyone in the subway car was reading either a newspaper or a book. A behavior she had once taken for granted seemed abnormal after months in Morocco, where no one does such a thing.<\/p>\n When in Morocco, I would sometimes ask my friends why they didn’t read more, or I would lament the lack of decent bookstores and public libraries. In the U.S., even small towns have public libraries, and the facilities in mid-sized cities like Asheville where I live now (population 70,000) are often excellent. In a large metropolis like San Francisco or New York, there are bookstores on three levels with special sections for poetry, science fiction, religion, travel, gay fiction, and computer languages. They are gathering places and beloved institutions, each with its own special flavor. Even the dullest suburban shopping mall is likely to have at least one national bookseller like Barnes and Noble. There are book sections in supermarkets and drug stores. Some of us laugh at these popular novels, but the point is, people are reading, even if they only read as an escape. And of course, amazon.com, one of the internet success stories of the 1990s, is a bookseller.<\/p>\n My Moroccan friends are quick to admit that Moroccans don’t have the habits of reading I’ve just described. They remind me that half the population is illiterate, but does that explain the other half? Why hasn’t a passion for reading ignited the younger generation, nearly all of whom have been to school? More importantly, why isn’t reading seen as a stairway to success? Independent reading (as opposed to the guided reading one does in school) opens the imagination, exposes a person to faraway places and unusual ideas, and demands critical thinking in order to integrate new information with what one already knows. All of these skills are useful in the modern workplace, even when answering phones or selling shoes, but certainly in cutting-edge professions such as technology and communications.<\/p>\n In her post, Cat in Rabat makes an interesting point. As they go from childhood to adulthood, Moroccans have to learn three different languages, Derija, Arabic and French. As a result, they often end up with an inadequate foundation in all three. While this may seem like an excuse for not developing a taste for reading, in fact it only underlines the importance of reading as a way of reinforcing one’s language skills. After all, the written word is more structured than everyday speech, so it is there that we learn to draw ideas together into an argument. A faux guide<\/i> may know how to say “Would you like to see the medina?” in Italian, Dutch and Japanese, but real communication in any language takes practice. Because we are all adrift in the global marketplace, reading is as indispensable for Morocco today as it was for the Jews when preserving their culture through 2000 years of exile.<\/p>\n There are certainly reasons besides laziness why literate Moroccans don’t read. One is simple economics. If you’re a young Moroccan earning $300 a month, this is barely enough (or not enough) to pay for rent, transportation and food, plus an occasional evening at the cafe. How likely are you to spend $5 to $10 on a book? If your routine is a relentless grind, and you return home every night too exhasted to do more than throw yourself into bed, how much reading will you do? Of course, I carried a book everywhere when I lived through a phase like this myself, but cultural habits are hard to break. Most habits are formed at an early age, which is why it is important to introduce children to books when they are still young. If their parents read to them, and they see their parents reading, nothing is more natural than to pick up a book when they are bored. I think it’s fair to say that with so much illiteracy among the older generation, very few young Moroccans have had this experience. <\/p>\n As an example of how bad it can get, the father of a friend of mine refused to buy him a notebook and pen for school when he was growing up, saying, “I’d rather see you working than studying.” His mother had to give him the money when his father wasn’t looking. This leads us to another problem, the fact that Moroccan schools expect students to repeat what they are told instead of developing their own ideas. They are too often punished for showing independence, or for asking questions. Modern education theory understands that learning is not the memorization of facts, but the acquisition of skills that can be used independently. Moroccan schools are notoriously old-fashioned about this, perhaps because they don’t want young people to think (see my post Waiting for the Rain<\/a>). The result is a high dropout rate, low information retention, and no analytical skills. As my friend Doga puts it, even though they know how to read, today’s high school graduates are still illiterate because they never learned to think. They may be worse off than a true illiterate, because they believe they know something. <\/p>\n The story becomes even more complicated when we realize that for all the reasons given above, there are people who say Morocco is not ready for democracy. How can people who either can’t read, or don’t read, or don’t know how to analyze what they read make an informed choice about political parties and programs? They will be victims of demagogues who appeal to their sloppy habits of thought, such as the PJD. Better not to have elections at all, these people argue. But isn’t it a vicious circle? Isn’t the lack of democracy one reason for the poor state of the schools, and the lack of intellectual development? I’ve had friends propose that what Morocco needs is a “total change in its mentality,” the kind of clean sweep only a tidal wave or a plague can provide. Faced with the closed circle, the impossibility of knowing where to begin, they lapse into pessimism and demand the impossible. <\/p>\n So where do<\/i> we begin? How about a national “I Love to Read” campaign, with distribution of books for free, in the poor city neighborhoods and in the villages? How about public service announcements showing parents reading to their kids, and construction of new libraries all across Morocco? How about a photo of the king reading a book? We see him drinking tea, having his hand kissed, posing with generals. As the national symbol and role model, wouldn’t it be nice to see him reading, especially if the State followed through to get books into the hands of everyone?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cat in Rabat has a provocative post about literacy and habits of reading in Morocco. She relates that on a recent visit to Spain with her husband, she was shocked to see that nearly everyone in the subway car was reading either a newspaper or a book. A behavior she had once taken for granted seemed abnormal after months in Morocco….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":519,"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions\/519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.eatbees.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}I…have never seen a soul in Rabat read a book at a caf\u00e9, on a train, or waiting at a bus stop. Simply put, this is not an exaggeration on my part. I wish it were. […]<\/ul>\n
I simply cannot comprehend a world without books. Our parents read to my brother and I before bedtime; we were encouraged to read for ourselves when we became a certain age…; weekend trips to the public library were considered a natural way to spend a Saturday; used book stores acquired an importance early in our lives that has never diminished. Like my father, I never go anywhere without a book\u2014you just never know when you’ll have a spare moment to read a few pages.<\/ul>\n