Based on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted in urban Moroccan high schools, this dissertation explores the relationship between Arabization – post-Independence nationalizing agenda – and public education. It argues that the contemporary tensions traversing the public school relate to Morocco's ambivalent cultural politics in the postcolonial period and to the social fragmentation this cultural politics has encouraged.

During 2007 and 2008, Moroccan public education was widely acknowledged to be in crisis. Both government and international organizations recommended technical correctives to remodel student competences. What they disregarded is that the Arabized public school has been the cultural battleground for the negotiation of Morocco as postcolonial, modernized and developing country. In this light, the knowledge economy of the public school needs to be interrogated as a cultural frame with a socio-political history. Through classroom observations, discussions with students, teachers and parents and curricula analysis, I trace the Arabized school's ambiguous bilingualism between French and Arabic (fus&dotbelow;h&dotbelow;ā) and narrate how school participants encounter their colonial heritage as this is re-articulated in the discourse of development. Besides being endangered by the continuous promotion of the French language, Arabization suffers from internal contradictions; through its deployment for the preservation of monarchical authority, Arabization maintains the sacredness and immutability of fus&dotbelow;h&dotbelow;ā at the expense of the language's wider deployment in new spheres of expression. This tension frustrates students' efforts at social integration and leads to profound skepticism towards the state's moral authority. Arabization is further challenged by alternative portrayals of Moroccan-ness voiced by the Amazigh cultural movement, which is increasingly lending its vocabulary to students' self-narratives.

Focusing on the practical articulation between school participants and institution, I nuance theories of socio-cultural reproduction, ideological interpellation and postcolonial criticism to account for unpredictability, incompleteness and ambivalence. These dynamics reconfigure the school, from mechanism of social and symbolic engineering to public space where the cultural politics of Morocco is debated. The debate engages discipline orientations, language form and language training, history, science, translation and moral cultivation. It extends to the experience of cultural politics outside the school where cultural identification and creativity get constantly re-signified through the everyday practices of students.