The Girls' Vocational School in Damascus

We publish below a summary of the report presented to the Lebanese Arab Women's Federation by its president, Mrs. Rose Shahfa, on the Girls' Vocational School in Damascus:

The Lebanese Arab Women's Federation has an old goal over which the years have rolled while it still looks toward it, firm in its faith of attaining it. Time and again it has laid this request before its successive governments, and they have not yet fulfilled it — the establishment of a vocational school for girls, to serve as a means of arming young women with trades and crafts that would ward off from them the consequences of want and unemployment. The Federation lately decided to delegate one of its members to study this question by getting in touch with the vocational school in Damascus. The choice fell upon me. I went there expressly, met with one of its directresses, and brought back valuable information about it, to serve as a foundation for the school we dream of — the school that will fulfill the hopes of the Committee on Education, which has so often striven to establish it.

I toured the school with some of its directresses and teachers, going through its spacious quarters, where I saw the various crafts. Here was a section of students working carpets, their hands moving with wonderful speed, knotting the many-colored woolen threads upon the pattern before them with skill and taste; and here were the carpet pieces with their beautiful designs, no different from embroidered pictures in their figures and scenes — a thing to command admiration. Delight showed on the faces of the students, who enter the school of their own free will. The overwhelming majority take to the sewing lessons, because these yield a quick profit. And here is the embroidery branch, where the student begins by learning the different stitches and then goes on until she has mastered its many divisions. After this we entered a spacious, clean kitchen, stocked with vessels of every kind, where the students learn this branch during the four years they spend within the school's walls. They also learn darning and drawing; the cleaning of carpets, brass, silverware, and clothes of their stains; and engraving on brass, tin, and wood. They held a beautiful exhibition of their work which astonished the public with the models it contained, of the utmost perfection and originality. The students learn these crafts in order to practice them in their own homes, instead of going out to work in the marketplaces.

I marveled at what I saw, and wished for Lebanon its like — the more so since Lebanon is the sole summer resort of the Arab countries, where such products of its young women could find a ready market. Would that the specialists took this question in hand and worked to bring into being this vocational school, which would lighten unemployment and help in the education of the girl.