Our Children and Our Language

... Miss Nahida Fadli returns to writing once again, but in her article today she treats an educational and linguistic problem, whereas before we knew her only as a poetess with a taste for beauty!

We appreciate in Miss Nahida Fadli her learning and her literary taste, and we are certain that she will keep the promise she made to herself and send us from Cyprus, the green island, splendid literary material!

It pleases me, from time to time, to gather around me a handful of charming children and to talk together as if we were friends who know no formality. Among these charming ones was a boy of six whom I caught sticking out his tongue at his little girl companion. I asked him: "What do you have a tongue for?" And with an affectionate readiness he answered: "To talk." I said: And why do you talk? Open bewilderment came over him, then he laughed a long while and said: "You don't know why?" I turned my face to his little companion and asked her teasingly: "Did you see the moon last night, sweetie?" Her eyes sparkled and she answered quite calmly: No!

I rose from among them with a problem in my head. How lovely that the child should make me feel he understands — that he knows the first function of language is transmission: the transmission of thoughts, notions, feelings, and requests, since it is the instrument of expression by means of which Zayd converses with Amr on all the affairs of life. The child knew this function; he knew it by his living instinct and his strong feeling, which dictated to him that language is a strong bond among a people..

And I went off thinking about the value of talking, and consequently about the value of language. The child had made me understand that it is the instrument of expression, but he had created for me and for his little companion a problem whose solution demands the devoted minds of psychologists and educators — and before them the men of letters, the masters of the word. Do these, I wonder, understand language only as an instrument of expression? My conviction is that it goes farther than that, for modern education concentrates the importance, in the teaching of language, on two things — this quite apart from the first matter, which the child knew by instinct.

As for the aim of teaching language: first, the cultivation and refinement of artistic taste, by giving the child artistic models to read and savor, so that he feels them and they become something important to him. And the second aim: the development of a thinking that ranges free through the horizons of life in pursuit of eternal truth — the thinking that gives the personality its many branches and stamps it with its own character.

I ask myself: in the teaching of the Arabic language, do we pursue these two aims — I mean the cultivation of taste and the freeing of thought — and, before everything else, is it our concern to make the Arabic language a medium of expression among the Arabs themselves?

The answer is no... no... Were it otherwise, the little girl would not have answered me in English when I asked her in classical Arabic: Did you see the moon?!

The Arabic language, as it is understood at school, is very far indeed from the Arabic language as it is understood at home, in the street, and at the cinema. At home the child hears a language other than the one the school imposes upon him; so if he wants to express himself before his companions, he breaks free of the fetters of subject and absolute object, particles that resemble verbs, and the comparative, and talks as he pleases — comparing, weighing, describing, and drawing his figures from the reality of his own life. But when he comes to read, in his schoolbook, about a boy conversing with his companions, he finds him talking pompously, remotely, plunging ever deeper into the use of a language the child has never grown familiar with. So he draws away from it, and goes on drawing farther and farther away, until, when he has grown up and has studied another language that draws its water from life itself, he finds himself rushing headlong into its gardens — and behold, most of our educated people express themselves in a foreign language: call it French, or English, or any other language, but not Arabic..

All the young turn away from the language, and there remain the sheikhs of literature, who do not understand the language except as a medium for the understanding of those who are its absolute masters. And so classical Arabic departs from the reality of our lives, and the pupil comes to study Arabic at school like any other alien subject — like physics or algebra, for example.. He must study the workings of kana and its sisters, inna and its sisters, the verbs of preference, simile, metaphor, and metonymy from the sciences of badi' and bayan, and all the rest of those Sanskrit terminologies — things of which he comprehends nothing; he merely memorizes them to hurl at the teacher in the hour of the examination — "and God spared the believers the fighting" — for he leaves the hall without them, and if a little of it sticks in his mind, it is only for the sake of a joke.

It is a complicated problem, the problem of the Arabic language as it is taught in our schools by teachers whom ill luck — the ill star of the rising Arab generation — willed to be teachers of the language. For all of them — and it behooves me to be fair and say most of them — are good at reading, at writing, and at memorizing poetry, and no more. As for choosing material that a child would enjoy reading and savoring, that is a matter far beyond them. And education is something they have never heard of. They teach our children that "kana" is a defective past verb that enters upon the subject and predicate, putting the first in the nominative — which is called its noun — and the second in the accusative — which is called its predicate. So our children memorize this formula, and it is one of dozens of formulas imposed on the pupil that mean nothing to him beyond words laid out in rows, utterly remote from his reality — rigid, cold, without life in them. And however hard the capable teacher may try to breathe life into them, he cannot succeed, because they died out of our life ages ago and have gone on living in the books we inherited from the fifth and sixth and seventh centuries of the Hijra, transmitted by the books of the twentieth century and taught alongside the other books, which were composed to suit the mentality and the temperaments of pupils in every subject of instruction — except Arabic!!

It is a national and educational crisis, and we must hasten to find a solution for it. This solution will come only by way of a group of people who believe that there exists a problem far graver than most of the problems occupying the minds of the Arab world today: the problem of the remoteness of classical Arabic from our children. The first thing that must concern us is to make the language easy, by loosening its fetters and subjecting it to the scientific laws of evolution, which require it to draw its material and its terminology from the twentieth century and not from the first Jahiliyya; and that there be stripped from it this sanctity which the sheikhs of literature have imposed upon it ever since the coming of tolerant Islam, which drew its teachings from the reality of the people's life. And we shall never be able to spread the language in our schools unless we wipe out the reactionary mentality that distinguishes the teachers of Arabic and replace it with the mentality of the young — those who have studied the principles of education, believed that the problem exists, worked to preserve the precious literary heritage, and lived in the twentieth century..

Ladies and gentlemen, the Arabic language as it is taught in our schools kills the pupil's capacity to think and deforms his artistic taste, because the books imposed on pupils are pamphlets — misshapen offshoots of the old literary and linguistic tomes — containing every stray scrap of verse and prose passages, all chosen to display the splendor of badi' and bayan and the outlandish meaning. So the pupil, when he reads them and cannot relish their meaning — because he could not reach it through such a structure — the child is driven to take up the English reader, where he finds what delights and pleases him; and you see him reading about them, because if they are children, they think as he thinks, and if they are men, they realize his hopes and his dreams.

Would that those who hold the reins of the language understood that selection matters far more than the imposing of material which can mean nothing to the child but a burden on his back, his duty being to memorize it because the teacher wants it so, and nothing more. It is our duty to reconsider the material that is taught, and to choose what is suitable in it — not according to the erroneous historical order, but according to a particular scientific law, the law of development: Jahili literature does not suit the mentality of the elementary pupil, nor does modern literature suit the mentality of the secondary pupil.

And then, for what purpose is Arabic taught in our schools? Has it ever occurred to our teachers to test how far their pupils savor the aesthetic value of a passage, or have they attended to nothing but the meaning of a strange word and its parsing — as if the Arabic lesson were demolition and not building, and as if the pupil read the passage for the purpose of explaining a difficult word!! or of knowing its place in the parsing? Explanation and parsing are a means to the savoring of the passage, not the aim of teaching.

Ladies and gentlemen: our children are far from our language — and it is the instrument of expression, the awakener of thought, and the refiner of taste.