The Problem of the Child and the Book?

The storyteller sat in the editorial office telling us the story of her son, seven years old — seven years, no more...

She said: He came home from school yesterday evening dragging his satchel along the ground — I swear to you, he was dragging it along the ground. It alarmed me, and I supposed the school satchel held who knows what. I looked in, and there it was, counted and itemized:

Two books for Arabic reading.
Two books for French reading.
A book for English reading.
The book of civic education.
A book on the history of Lebanon.
Principles of Modern Sciences.
A book for arithmetic.
Readings in geography.
The Modern Illustrated Geography.

And the lady pressed her hands to her head, trying to remember... What else? What else? But she could remember nothing beyond:

A notebook for dictation.
A notebook for copying.
A notebook for arithmetic.
A notebook for geography.
Three notebooks for French.
A notebook for drawing.

And she pressed her head once more, trying to remember... but by then she was dizzy, and could remember no more...

I said: Well, what then?

She said: What then? Write, for God's sake, write! Is it permissible that children like these should carry subjects as heavy as these?

Ask the Ministry of National Education in Lebanon how it came to prepare such subjects for such children??

And ask the masters of the primary schools how it is permissible for a child of seven to study "Principles of Modern Sciences" — indeed, how he can even pronounce the first of its lessons, "The Body and Its Apparatus."

— And in fact the respectable lady managed to pronounce "its apparatus" only with difficulty...

And ask, I beg you, the authors of these books... ask them: for whom did they write them? For these children? And how are such children to carry all this information? In such books, in such printing?

And the storytelling lady went on to draw the comparison with an English book printed in London... She said: "The very sight of it whets the child's appetite for reading... large letters, colored printing that rests the eye, well-spaced lines, three words to a line, and three lines to a page..."

And the lady sighed, for she had an appointment with her child to tutor him; she gathered herself up and went off to where the piles of books and notebooks awaited her — and poor childhood, lost in lost curricula...

A deep and fundamental educational problem is the problem of "the child versus the author," and the problem of the school versus the program, and the problem of the parents versus the child, the school, the author, and the program. We shall return to this subject.