The American School for Girls in Beirut constitutes the first school ever founded for girls in Lebanon and Syria.
The institution has become a venerable elder, past the hundred mark by twelve years, for its birth goes back to the
year 1834; yet the first class to graduate from it did so in the year 1873 — that is, seventy-three years ago. The graduates then numbered only three, one of them the wife of the learned Ibrahim al-Hourani, and among them Rahil Ata, who later married the late learned Butrus al-Bustani. In the school's early days the number of graduates continued to range between three and six until the year 1900, when it began to increase gradually, until it exceeded six hundred girls, every one of whom has proved her worth in the field of work in all its varieties.
The direction of the school was entrusted first to the late Mikhail and Lulu Araman, and passed after them to Mrs. Eliza Everett. The learned Yaqub Sarruf and Mrs. Farha Haddad rendered a very great service in refining the girl of that age and the woman of the future. All of these championed the school, together with those who came after them, and it went on growing and gaining strength until it reached what it is today.
The present school consists of a building called "Jessup Hall," the oldest of its buildings, which contains the reception rooms, the administration, the dormitories, and the two departments of the kindergarten and the elementary school. Then another building, "Kennedy Hall," containing a large assembly hall for the students' gatherings and rooms for teaching; and finally a large hall for athletic games, beneath which is a spacious room where the day students take their meals.
As for the school's aim, it has been and remains to fit its students for the service of their homelands and their surroundings, by way of strong principles and sound learning and understanding. And this purpose, though it varies with the variety of individuals, times, and countries, does not vary in its essence.
It strives to make of every student an individual independent in her thinking, so that the student may adapt herself according to circumstances and conditions.
The school has four regular departments:
The kindergarten, for girls only, from the age of five to seven, equipped with the latest requisites of the children's garden and supervised by a specialized teacher. Then the elementary, intermediate, and upper departments, which today have come to comprise four hundred students from the various Arab countries and elsewhere, studying the various languages and sciences.
The school gives care to varied athletic games, to the point of making them compulsory for every one of its classes. It has several societies, among them the Girl Guides troop, whose aim is physical, spiritual, and social training; then the scholarly societies in the three languages, whose aim is to quicken those languages in writing and in public speaking — inviting speakers from outside from time to time.
The American School today pursues its activity with an energy that knows no weariness, firm in its old place despite the passage of the days, working to raise the level of society by refining its young woman, who is its essential pillar, its cornerstone, and the greatest support upon which its structure rests.
Beside this article the reader will see some pictures that tell of the work done by the students of the American School for Girls.
