Survival of the inventory spirit A handicap for the quality of the University Reform

Abstract

REFORM. not. f. Restoration in order, in the old form, or in a better form. These things need reform, complete reform. This could only be done through general reform. Reform of the institutions. The reform of morals. Calendar reform. Many reforms have been made in this administration.

RÉFORMME is also said when speaking of Horses of the cavalry, artillery, etc., which are not or are no longer in a state to serve. There was a reform of twenty horses in this regiment, which had to be replaced. A reform horse. We also say: Material under reform.

Dictionary of the French Academy 8th edition (1932)

The French language will always surprise: these are two practically contradictory meanings of the same reform, a term which has preoccupied us for many years. The first entry means, overall, restoring order and making it better. What is not the same thing, or, rather, not the same path to obtain the same thing: restoring in order is, in a situation of educational relevance, the equivalent of what I have called up to present to restore the academic in its rights, despoiled by so many informational practices (at the university level) and paradigmatic (at the level of the whole Moroccan educational system). The second entry means rejecting what has now been deemed unusable, outdated or foreclosed. We finish the horses well! Obviously, the contradiction is only apparent, and the second meaning is practically included in the second; you don't reform, you only make better by rejecting all or part of the object to be reformed. And it seems to us, as for the Abbé de Saint-Pierre de d'Alembert, that the education and training system is one of the “most useful establishments [which] need reform” such as these “clocks that 'you have to clean and reassemble from time to time'.

However, if the lexical reason, on which I often like to base my interventions [1], somewhat delimits the semantic framework, it remains insufficient to clearly specify the critical object of my remarks.

Let's reinvent the wheel a bit.

From the inside of the education and training system [2], reform is a masterful call for an ‘" epistemological pause ", which decides to modify certain relationships to knowledge according to the following guidelines:

- Academic and epistemic news insofar as the contents are both renewable at will and objects or supports of criticism and innovation,

- The methodological relevance of this report which would validate its production, transmission and reception systems; including the functionality (or lapse) of concepts and educational methods implemented as well as the appropriateness of skills acquired based on future societal, human and economic needs; and so,

- The efficiency of the training, in order not to waste their money and their time to the donors, the student, the employers and the community.

This means that we do not start a reform, when it involves heavy funds and major risks for the future of a country, just for the pleasure of adopting a new terminology and the resulting structuring ( or translate it?). This is not just a cover. It is a conceptual instrumentalization which, to restore in law and make better, had to ensure a critical cognitive awareness, therefore a reliable diagnosis, which, even taking into account the maqâmat (informal sessions) of the public opinion, must formalize the latter and transcend it, in order to decide what is to be preserved or reformed of the system object of Reform, such as this one could be translated in the daily life of the professors, and in the performances of the establishments. The Reformation implies a new normalization.

I would like in the following lines to demonstrate that despite the wealth of tables and documents produced for and around the Reformation, we forgot to include some guarantees in the quality assurance policy at University.