The Kindergarten

Among the noble works undertaken by the Lebanese Women's League is the founding this year of a kindergarten in Ras Beirut, which aims to raise children on strong national foundations while following the newest educational methods.

The school is directed with ability and devotion by Mrs. Edvick Jureidini Shayboub, while the technical side is in the care of Miss Nur Qamar, who founded several kindergartens in Iraq, the most important of them the Saadoun Model School in Baghdad.

The school consists of three classes, none exceeding twenty children, for that is the ideal number to enable the teacher to give each pupil individually the attention he needs. The first aim of this kindergarten is to develop individual powers and to treat the pupils as individuals, not as a group — each one directed toward the gifts nature has bestowed on him, under the teacher's supervision and care, while allowing him a measure of freedom so that he may bear the responsibility for what he does.

Among the school's most striking features is the spirit of affection that binds the teachers to their pupils, fixing in the pupils' minds the ways of understanding without scolding, threat, or punishment. The teachers watch over their every movement; even at playtime you see them attending to each child individually, observing how he mixes with the other children and how he is affected by what happens around him.

Nor does the school confine itself to this educational side alone; it begins teaching the children languages and handwork by means of games, songs, and various dialogues — Arabic being the basic language.

The national spirit governs everything done in the school. The first thing each morning is for the pupils to line up before the Lebanese flag and salute it to the music of the national anthem. The pupil who has excelled in anything the previous day is entrusted with carrying the flag as his reward, and so they race one another for that daily distinction.

What catches the eye in this kindergarten is the cleanliness, the order, and the taste: from the entrance, to the little garden, to the interior of the rooms with their small tables and chairs, the lovely drawings on the walls, the window curtains... Everything in the school, in its material and moral aspects alike, calls for pride and complete satisfaction.

And I say without exaggeration that this kindergarten of ours rivals the newest and best of the foreign kindergartens in Beirut — and Beirut, as everyone knows, contains no small number of excellent foreign schools.

I shall long remember the happy hours I spent in the kindergarten one morning, as a representative of this magazine, among a select company of Lebanon's children growing up in a national school that joins pride and national consciousness to the newest Western methods. This is without doubt a happy beginning that invites optimism at the dawn of our new era.

To the Lebanese Women's League we extend the most sincere praise and thanks for this vital idea of founding a kindergarten — and also to the directress and the teachers who are working to realize it with full devotion and competence.