What Are You Waiting For..?

What are you waiting for, to make education in Lebanon compulsory and free?

You wanted Lebanon to be the country of culture and learning, because it cannot be anything else. What, then, have you done to realize this wish?

Have you wiped out illiteracy in Lebanon? The proportion of illiterates here is no less than 50 percent among men and 80 percent among women, and if you doubt the truth of this statement, consult the statistics (1).

Is it with this saddening proportion that you expect Lebanon to become a cultural center?

The people around us are moving at a run while we still crawl like infants. In the countries surrounding us, elementary education — and secondary too — long ago became governmental and free. Here the father sells his land and toils to educate his children. And instead of free education being made general, the number of fee-charging schools keeps growing — schools whose owners differ in nothing from merchants and factory owners. They open the school, employ teachers, men and women, at meager, paltry wages — since no law prevents them from doing so — collect from the pupils what money they can collect, and realize what profits can be realized.

Learning has today become one of the necessities of life, and it is not permissible that the hands of profiteers toy with it. That is why rising governments shoulder its responsibility and offer the people free instruction — at least the elementary part of it — in return for the taxes they collect. And if private schools do exist, the government imposes its strict supervision upon them, watching their budgets, their wages, their curricula, the kind of instruction they give and their teachers, so as to prevent them from becoming centers of propaganda and exploitation.

And here — what supervision is imposed on the schools that pay their women and men teachers thirty liras a month? On those that employ staff who accept such wages because they are fit for no work at all? On those whose owners amass fortunes out of the school's income? On those that hand out their private certificates to the deserving and the undeserving alike, thereby misleading the pupils and those who employ them? On those whose whole concern is to entrench foreign influence or to make propaganda for certain parties?

The problem of education and of teachers in Lebanon has one solution and no other: that free elementary education be made universal — that is, that official elementary schools multiply until they meet the country's need and wipe out illiteracy; and that inspection in the official schools be made more searching and more effective, so that the standard of instruction in them may rise and thereby put an end to the competition of the private schools.

Second: that the private schools be made subject to government supervision — supervision of their budgets, the kind of their instruction, their teachers, and the scale of their salaries. In this way one unified law would be applied to all, and the head of a school would become an employee of the government; the government would bear the responsibility for any financial deficit, should one occur, and would prevent individuals from trafficking in learning and piling up profits.

As for the money needed to carry out this project — I mean free elementary education for all and government supervision over the schools — it can be provided by curbing the forms of waste, and especially by making the rate of taxation accord more closely with the rate of annual income. The government has only to review the tax systems followed by the countries advanced in their institutions, to see how most of their taxes are collected from the owners of wealth — the reverse of the situation among us.

They say that law is the will of the people. Where, then, is the people, to raise its voice and impose its will?

R. Gh.

(1) Pages 93–94 of Albert Hourani's Syria and Lebanon, second edition.