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A Humanising Education System

Riada: The Language of a Living Transformation

2 min read

Teachers are adjusting their practices. Pedagogical inspectors are feeding back insights from the field. Provincial directorates are learning how to facilitate the emergence of new relational fabrics while supporting the development of new frameworks, monitoring systems, and evaluation tools. Curricula, pedagogical approaches, and governance are evolving in real time, continuously nourished by lived experience. The system is learning to facilitate its own transformation.

This movement is real, profound, and unprecedented. Yet it often remains invisible to those who are making it happen, because no one has told them that they are co-creators of a pioneering transformation (Riada Tahawul). Many experience Riada as a programme to be implemented, one that may have a politically defined lifespan, and often as an additional requirement, rather than as a historic contribution.

The controversy surrounding Riada stems precisely from this dissonance in language. Institutional discourse speaks of a successful reform and nationwide scaling, while lived experience on the ground speaks of overload, “confusion,” and continuous adjustment. Both narratives are true. But in the absence of a shared language, the transformation itself becomes politically vulnerable.

This perceived “confusion” is, in reality, the hallmark of a living transformation, one that is inherently non-linear, not because it is failing, but because it is neither a top-down nor a bottom-up implementation. Rather, it is an iterative, multi-scalar, co-emergent process in which every level of the system transforms and is transformed by the others, giving rise to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The expectation of a neatly ordered, vertically deployed reform is precisely what makes Riada unintelligible to those who are its very protagonists. Our perception must expand, supported by a language that moves beyond Riada as a set of programmes towards Riada as the transformation itself.

Within an electoral timescale, this vulnerability can be exploited, not because Riada is failing, but because its deeper nature has not yet been fully articulated, and therefore has not yet been fully realised. Riada is a pioneering transformation that has yet to recognise itself. Offering it this mirror, through language, spaces of recognition, and coherence of narrative, is today the most powerful and protective strategic act, both politically and pedagogically.

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