Deconstructing Radical Otherness through Education

Abstract

The Moroccan educational system has inherited the 19th century axiological spirituality. A synthesis of Islam oriented morals together with the permanent call for resistance against different colonizers along the last two centuries and the influence of such historical and cultural Genesis is still shaping the strategic choices of values and orientations within the current learnings' modernization. Some paramount cases have become quite classic, namely when learners are called to react ethically to the historical events concerning the Jews destruction during the Second World War. Students are led to express less moral interest neither in learning nor in sympathizing with the victims or the survivors. Thus, moral education practice and orientation are challenged by the students' inability to develop a neutral stance of moral humanitarian arguments of a universal value.
 This study exposes the historical Genesis of the Moroccan cultural spiritualism to put across how otherness was structured through the traditional institutional moral learning. The lack of authentic humanitarian ethics is due to the hegemony of an institutionalized moral spiritualism at the detriment of empowering moral psychology of multicultural ethics. A pattern of moral imagination is therefore suggested to re-open the humanitarian ethics through genocide reconstruction and ethics.