Fez is Morocco’s spiritual capital. Like Morocco’s larger cities Fez is divided between the medina, the ancient, walled city and the new city with its supermarkets, boutiques, cafés and high-rise buildings. The call to prayer chimes and echoes throughout the city five times daily, reminding all of their place. However, unlike the uniformity of the prayers, the people are contrasting – Even within one family. Walking down the cobbled street there are three women, three generations walking arm in arm. The grandmother is covered from head to toe in a black burqa, leaving only her eyes visible, her daughter is wearing a simple hijab, leaving only her face exposed, while the granddaughter is dressed in the latest fad of jeans and a soft, form-fitting blouse. Her hair is exposed, blow-dried into a large coiffure, much like Egyptian pop singers on television. She is speaking French into her cell phone. As I look at them I recognize the significance of our time. We live in a global era, where modernity clashes with tradition and boundaries are no longer dictated by the nation state. There has been little foresight for the unprecedented scope of globalization we have entered. Tradition and culture are fluid and ever changing and schools too, must make changes to prepare and empower youth to be citizens in the 21st century.
"…what a difference it would make to our understanding if we looked at the world as a whole, a totality, a system, instead of as a sum of self-contained societies and cultures; if we understood better how this totality developed over time; if we took seriously the admonition to think of human aggregates as “inextricably involved with other aggregates, near and far, in weblike, netlike connections.
- Wolf, Europe and the People Without History
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