... 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

Have parents ever remembered that the child is like a thermometer, reflecting whatever joy or sorrow they feel?! And yet how often they cast his feelings aside, denying how deeply he is affected by the family atmosphere, not knowing that his inner life is touched by sadness, fear, love, and the rest, even before he understands the language of speech? And since we are confident that the deaf and dumb possess a sense unique of its kind, the theory that the child senses the family atmosphere is not far from the truth.

The child looks at his parents as if they were a picture of his own self, but on a wider scale. He comes to know life through them, and is affected by whatever affects them. To grasp this truth makes parents more guarded in their conduct with their children, and more careful to avoid idle chatter and the criticizing of people.

We do not truly know the value of the child's sense of the family atmosphere until we compare the personalities of two children: the first brought up in an atmosphere full of understanding and cheerfulness, the other brought up in an atmosphere contrary to that. The child who grows up in surroundings brimming with family disputes will have a contradictory personality and an uneasy inner life, because he will have believed that his parents were understanding and loving of one another. And when he is taken by surprise by some disagreement or quarrel between them that clouds the family atmosphere, he falls into perplexity, for he had never reckoned on this contradiction. This perplexity of mind draws down upon his inner life evils whose consequences are not to be praised. That is why specialists in the rearing of children impress upon parents that they must take care to preserve their understanding with one another, in the service of their children's happiness...