Due to high prices, parents and consumer advocates demand abandoning imported books during the next school year

Agadir24

With the approach of the 2024/2025 school year, parents and guardians of students and consumer protection associations have raised the demand to abandon imported books, which causes their prices to rise in libraries.

While booksellers confirmed the existence of new increases in imported school books, ranging from five to ten dirhams depending on each curriculum, parents, guardians and consumer advocates warned of the impact of this on the deteriorating purchasing power of Moroccan families.

Given that these increases only include private schools, some parents’ associations called on families whose children attend these schools not to purchase imported books, considering them “supplementary and non-binding.”

In response to this issue, Nourredine Akouri, President of the Federation of Parents and Guardians of Students, revealed that the Ministry of National Education, Preschool and Sports called last year to ban imported books, noting that “their continued sale in bookstores coinciding with the start of the school year is contrary to this recommendation.”

Akouri explained that “the prices of imported books are very expensive, and no class of families can afford them, especially in light of the current circumstances,” noting that “their contents are not suitable for Moroccan culture, and often, as every year, many of these phenomena are observed in this regard.”

The same speaker warned against “the practices of some schools that require, in addition to the school year’s curriculum, the purchase of certain school supplies,” stressing that “these phenomena have been monitored, and families must reject them.”

The head of the Federation of Parents and Guardians of Students noted that “these books are optional for families, and the prescribed books remain the basic ones,” stressing that “any family that faces pressure from any private school to buy these books must file a complaint with the relevant authorities.”

For its part, the Moroccan Association for Consumer Rights has called on private schools and those affiliated with foreign missions to abandon the imposition of imported books on families and to adhere only to the educational curricula issued by the relevant ministry for the private sector.

The university stated, through its president, Bouazza Al-Kharati, that “the school book prescribed by the relevant ministry, whether in the public or private sector, is regulated and cannot witness increases,” while he pointed out that “imported books are subject to the free price and therefore private school owners must give them up in exchange for relying on the curriculum set by the ministry.”

The same human rights activist concluded that “the imported books are supplementary,” while calling on the relevant authorities to push private schools to adopt what is stipulated in the curriculum, especially since “the adoption of such books in the private sector constitutes an injustice to the student in the public sector and deepens the disparity in educational curricula,” according to his expression.