School Bullying as a Hidden Driver of Dropout: A Socio-Educational Reading of Symbolic Violence in the Moroccan School Context

Abstract

This article, through its inductive axes, seeks to shed light on the structure of the Moroccan school as a symbolic system in which forms of domination and educational exclusion intersect. Within this framework, school bullying shifts from an incidental individual or collective behaviour to an inevitable phenomenon that covertly contributes to the production and reproduction of school dropout. To unpack this issue, the analysis draws on socio-educational theoretical frameworks, particularly Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition, to understand the erosion of pedagogical ties and the decline of students’ sense of school belonging because of diminished social and self-recognition. It also adopts Bourdieu’s critical structural approach to explain how the contemporary educational system disseminates symbolic violence as a concealed mechanism of regulation. Methodologically, the study employs an interpretive socio-educational analysis to reveal the dialectic between bullying and dropout within the broader transformation of school values. The findings indicate that school dropout is not merely a threat to the educational reality but also a manifestation of the school’s failure to safeguard its primary functions, namely, education and the internalisation of values of qualification and socio-educational inclusion; this calls for a reconsideration of the school structure as an inclusive moral system grounded in equity and the human dignity of the learner.