Miss Nahla Marwa spoke previously, in the section "Education Is an Art," of the importance of cooperation between the home and the school, and of the necessity of understanding between the mother and the teacher over the child's education; here she examines "the role of the mother and the home in the child's education before send-ing him to kindergarten."

Last time I spoke of the impor-tance of cooperation between the home and the school, and of the necessity of understanding between the mother and the teacher over the child's educa-tion. Now I shall examine the role of the mother and the home in educating the child before he is sent to kinder-garten and then to school.

The task of the home and the mother is a very grave one in the child's upbringing before he goes to school — I mean in the first years of his childhood, before he becomes able to enter kindergarten. I do not exaggerate when I say that the child's personality and his growth depend on the kind of upbringing he receives at this stage of life. I have begun to feel that our homes do not give this matter sufficient importance, and that this defi-ciency in the child's upbringing has become a major cause of the failure of his growth. The basic reason for this deficiency is the mother's ignorance of the importance attached to the care of her child before he enters school. There is no doubt that most of our mothers have come to believe in the necessity of sending the child to school when he completes his fifth or sixth year; but unfortunately

these mothers have not an atom of belief in the necessity of attending to the child's upbringing before he reaches this age — that is, the mother is ignorant of the standing of kindergartens and ignorant of the meaning of the attention she ought to give her child in his first years.

One mother said to me one day: "There is nothing in the kindergarten but play for the children; there they do not set them to their letters and they give them no books." This mother is ignorant of the value of play for children, and I do not think she knows the kindergarten program at all, or what this program means for these little ones. The kinder-garten program is drawn up in a manner suited to the child's psychology; it helps to direct his inclinations and refine his instincts. And above all this, it prepares them to take up their letters, just as you wish, dear mother.

When your child enters school at five or six years of age, coming straight from home without having spent a year or two in kindergarten, he is obliged at this age to begin learning to read and write without any prior preparation. He thus stands before new, thorny, difficult things which he has never heard of and has not been prepared to receive, and this most often makes him recoil from school, because he feels that he falls short of his other companions and that he is unable to follow the program laid down for children of his age. His growth, then, is not complete, and he is in urgent need of special treatment. The reason for this retardation of his growth is that he was not sent to a kindergarten, and that his upbringing at home was neglected. This last point is no less important than the first, for the child in his first years counts for nothing in the home: in the first and second year of his life he is a doll for the mothers to amuse themselves with; then he becomes a tool in the hands of the maid. Here is the element of deficiency and the secret of the error. If every mother knew her duty, she would realize that her son's education begins from the moment he first sees the

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