This is the first time I have spoken to you since my return from the United States, and perhaps you expect my talk to be, as usual, confined to particular matters and limited points that do not go beyond the rules of raising the child, caring for him, and guiding him. But I have found it preferable to acquaint you with some of what I saw and noted of the raising of children in the United States of America.

There is no room, in my belief, for comparison between our raising of our children and the Americans' raising of theirs. Our child-rearing is still confined within a limited scope that has not developed much beyond what it was before; in America, however, education has rules and foundations other than those we know and to which our children are accustomed. It therefore takes in the child's life in all its details and attends to his needs in all their variety.

In our society, however, the child is not yet respected. In most of our homes he is treated, in his first months, as a toy for the parents' amusement; then the maid takes him over. She feeds him because his mother has visitors; she plays with him because his mother has gone visiting. After that he is sent off to school, and the teacher alone becomes the bearer of the responsi-bility, with the help of the simple-minded maid. And if there is no maid in the house, the mother stays by her child, but her knowledge of the principles of child-rear-ing is very slight. Then our infants' schools and the elementary school, unfortunately, do not give the child what he needs, because those who work with these children have not been prepared to bear this charge. The prevailing opinion among us is that anyone who has mastered reading and writing is fit to teach in an elementary school. Very few indeed in Lebanon are the elementary schools that contain specialists.

And when I speak of Lebanon, I take in the whole of Lebanon, its cities and its villages; for if we took the city of Beirut alone, for example, and spoke of its schools, we should not have given a true picture of our country. If we look at certain private schools in

Beirut that attend to the elementary grades, we must not forget that there are hundreds of our elementary schools floundering in the chaos of ignorance and indifference.

We are in need, then, of schools for the training of men and women teachers, to make them ready to teach in the elementary school; for children have their own personality, and therefore they need specialists. The education of small children in America is a branch standing on its own among the branches of education and instruction, and they lavish upon it a care that holds every meaning of sacrifice and devotion for the sake of those little ones, because they believe they are preparing them to shoulder the homeland's weighty responsibilities in the days of their future.

In every one of the states of America today there are countless colleges for specialization and training in elementary teaching. The student spends four years in such a college in order to be qualified to teach in an elementary school. In these four years he is given the chance to practice teaching in a model school under the supervision of specialists before he begins work on his own after leaving the college — for they believe that a teacher, whatever high diplomas he may hold, is not fit to teach in an elementary school unless he has studied, in addition to his diploma, the principles of education and the methods of teaching. In our country, on the other hand, the elementary teachers' training colleges are very few; whence, then, can we hope to have specialists, and how can we hope for success, or for life, for the elementary school?

Our country today is in the most pressing need of the opening of elementary teachers' training colleges — urban and rural — to fill the immense void of which we complain.

It is fitting that I mention here that our Ministry of National Education intends to establish a new elementary teachers' training college together with a model elementary school.