The digital revolution has promised for twenty years to reinvent the classroom. But between institutional discourse about the school of the future and the reality experienced by Tunisian teachers, a substantial gap persists, revealed with clinical precision by field research.
This study, titled “Digital Education and the Issues of the School of the Future: Tunisia as an Example” and published in 2025, provides a frank diagnosis of the Tunisian educational system at the time of the digital transformation.
Conducted with 100 teachers, complemented by questionnaires aimed at learners and their parents as well as by interviews with inspectors and officials of the National Center for Technologies in Education, this research goes beyond mere observation to interrogate the very foundations of an unfinished digital transition.
A founding paradox: commitment without preparation
The first lesson of this survey lies in a striking paradox. While 90% of the surveyed teachers acknowledge that digitizing lessons constitutes an effective strategy to improve the teaching-learning process, 73% of them have never benefited from structured training in the use of educational technologies.
The intellectual commitment to the principle thus precedes by a wide margin the practical mastery of the tools, creating a generation of convinced teachers but often at a loss in the face of the technical demands of digital technologies.
This asymmetry is not merely an anecdote. It reflects a structural failure in how the Tunisian educational system has approached its own mutation. Existing trainings, when offered, suffer, according to the testimonies gathered from inspectors and school principals, from organizational shortcomings and a derisory number of hours, rarely exceeding one hour per week.
Self-learning then becomes the norm given that the majority of teachers who have acquired digital competence did so through their university studies or through sustained personal effort, in the absence of any coherent institutional guidance.
The infrastructure, the blind spot of the digital strategy
