The Problem of Lebanese Education

Is it true that there are signs of good on the horizon, and harbingers of reform and renewal? However that may be, let us cast our bucket in among the buckets, soothing ourselves once more with "perhaps" and "maybe."

The problem of education in Lebanon is one of the chronic problems, and, as with chronic diseases, its symptoms become familiar to the one afflicted, so that he grows used to bearing them and being patient with them, unless he treats them by various methods until he hits upon the effective remedy.

What change has come over education in Lebanon since the era of independence, that is, for nine years? The number of schools has increased in proportion to the increase in population, but the increase still falls short of the need, and we still hope that it will become possible to apply the law of compulsory elementary education in the near future, as the new Minister of Education has declared. And the curriculum has been amended in a way that makes it the equal of its predecessor in the crowding and piling-up of subjects and in its capacity to exhaust the student, especially when he is asked to prepare two curricula instead of one and to study three languages instead of one or two.

Apart from this, no change worth mentioning has come over Lebanese education. The teachers — and I mean especially the teachers of the private schools — have no statute to change their old situation, and there is no visible effort to change the condition of the schools from what it was in the days of the Mandate. Secondary and higher education is still confined to the sectarian and foreign schools, that is, to the private schools, and the government has taken no step in this direction except the creation of what they call the nucleus of the Lebanese University.

The problems of education in Lebanon branch into five at least, which I mention according to their importance: the problem of the men and women teachers; the problem of the private schools, foreign, sectarian, and national; the problem of the curricula; the problem of vocational education; the problem of textbooks.

Let us begin with the first of these problems.

In 1945 the number of men and women teachers in Lebanon was 5,092, of whom 887 were in official schools and the rest, that is 4,200, in private schools. The number of teachers in the official schools has increased greatly with the rise in the number of these schools from 300 to 700; and despite this, the number of teachers in the private schools is still three times their number in the official schools, and the number of private schools — sectarian, foreign, and national — is three times the number of schools attached to the Ministry of Education.

We conclude from the foregoing that when the Ministry of National Education confines its attention to the official schools and their teachers, it neglects two-thirds of the problem of education in Lebanon; and from here come the ills from which education as a whole groans in this country.

In Lebanon today there are no fewer than six thousand men and women teachers to instruct and graduate some one hundred and eighty thousand boy and girl students. And we ask ourselves: where were six thousand persons prepared for teaching in Lebanon, and where are the new contingents being prepared to whom this task will be entrusted in the near future? The problem of preparing teachers among us is one of the gravest of problems, because it meets with no attention on the part of those responsible. There is in Lebanon only one school for graduating men teachers for the elementary grades and another for graduating women teachers. And it is clear that two schools cannot meet the need of the Ministry of Education, whose schools grow more numerous every year; who, then, is to prepare the teachers of the private schools, whose number is three times the number of the government schools?

There was recently founded the Higher Teachers' College to prepare masters for secondary teaching, but this school alone does not meet the need of secondary education, and it is essential that the number of men's and women's teachers' colleges be multiplied, especially for elementary teaching, which comprises the overwhelming majority of the country's students, that is, 150 thousand out of 180 thousand. In other words, five-sixths of them.

Among the delusions current in our country is our belief that anyone at all can teach at the elementary level provided he knows how to read and write. It is a belief mistaken in the extreme, because elementary teaching demands a professional and technical preparation that higher and secondary teaching do not demand — a principle which all the scholars of education in the present age affirm.

The teachers' statute must impose a minimum for the teacher's wage and likewise a minimum for his cultural preparation. That is, every teacher must

hold the complementary certificate as the minimum of his educational level, and in addition to it a pedagogical diploma from a recognized school. And if we counted the men and women teachers who possess these qualifications in the government schools and the private schools, we should find them a tiny minority. And no doubt the failure of five thousand men and women teachers to form a syndicate to guarantee their rights is proof of how ill-prepared the majority of them are for this profession.

Let me sum up the reforms that must be carried out in this respect:

1 — The creation of sufficient schools to prepare men and women teachers for the elementary grades first, and for the secondary second. As for the professors of higher teaching in the universities, their specialization can be carried out abroad for a fixed period.

2 — Attention to preparing a sufficient number of inspectors and directors for elementary and secondary education, so that the Ministry of Education may be able to impose its supervision on the private schools. For this supervision will remain a name without substance so long as the Ministry lacks the specialists capable of carrying out the work of supervision and inspection.

3 — Purging the schools gradually of the incompetent, that is, of those who hold no certificate of any kind and have no aptitude for progress and self-cultivation.

4 — Drawing up a law of wages and promotion that does justice to the teachers in the private and official schools, and enforcing the law of the minimum teacher's wage.

5 — Amending the law of sick compensation and the indemnities for dismissal and service in the teachers' statute so that it becomes at least the equal of what is in the Lebanese labor law.

These reforms are bound closely to the rest of the problems of education in Lebanon, especially to the problem of the private schools, since the condition of the teachers in these schools cannot be improved unless the government controls them in an effective manner — a subject which requires a study of its own.