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

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