Educational Awareness

.. A number of educational guidance courses are meeting in Beirut this summer, perhaps the most important of them being the one organized every year by the University, with the participation of the education-division technicians of Point Four, to raise the level of the Arab teacher..

... Miss Samira Azzam listened to one group of this course, and here she comments on what she heard, saying:

I was visiting a professor of education, one of those charged with giving lectures on the teaching of languages according to modern applied concepts, in the course held at the American University of Beirut and attended by a number of men and women teachers of the government schools in the Arab countries, delegated by their governments for this purpose.

I was not alone in visiting my friend; visiting her also were some of the women teachers who had been listening to the lectures on the subject of language teaching. It was natural for the talk to move by degrees from mention of Beirut's heat and the magic of the mountain — which the newly arrived ladies were seeing for the first time, marveling at all this splendor embodied in the peaks, in the glens, and in the pine trees standing erect in the vigor of a green youth — until it settled upon the subject of the course, when the teachers followed their nature and would not be kept from talk of study and teaching. So our hostess, a specialist in the subject as I have said, set about attacking the antiquated methods of teaching the Arabic language in our schools, in point of technique, of means, and of teaching apparatus, saying that these causes together have so complicated the matter for teachers that the Arabic lesson has become harder for the Arab pupil than the study of any foreign language, whose teaching is aided by adroitness of presentation, ease of technique, and abundance of the means of illustration.

The Arabic reading book wears the pupil out when it requires him to learn a certain letter written in two forms and another in three patterns; and the curricular book goes to the extreme of harshness when it sets out to impose vocabulary too large for the small head to grasp its meaning, or to find for it any material referent in his own world.

It may be right to say that most of these problems are not school problems so much as general linguistic questions, occupying the minds of that band anxious to simplify the Arabic language in respect of its form and the manner of writing the letter, so that it may be brought within the correct use of the common people, and mastery of Arabic writing may not remain the preserve of the elite, as is now the case.

I do not wish in this talk to enter into technical details of which I may not speak as well as others; I have offered all this only by way of preface to a point my friend made in the course of her campaign against the Arabic schoolbook, when she said...

We cannot strip any subject of its educational task alongside its basic purpose. The author of a book must not aim at technique alone, dismissing every other consideration; there is the psychological side, which these books all but neglect. One well-known teaching book confines whole chapters of the book to a series of prohibitions, every one beginning with "don't" and ending with a short homily: (Don't do that...) (Don't touch this...) (Don't say...) (Don't talk...) (Don't rise from a gathering before...) — don't and don't and don't, in a preaching manner that wearies grown-ups: how much more the little ones, who arrive — and must arrive — at the discovery of their surroundings by experiment. Such a spirit is enough to make of the small child a vessel into which the preachers pour whatever they please, without allowing the child's individuality to take shape.

We hear those who call for model schools, but we hear no call for setting the teaching material aright. And how can schools be model schools if what is taught in them is not model material? There is no room here to point to the necessity of providing the model teacher — that is a separate subject on its own.

The composition of a curricular book — any book — for the teaching of any subject must be a complete piece of work, not at odds with the psychological theories upon which the model school and the model home are founded.

The Arabic curricular books lack, in their spirit, the quality of being an auxiliary educational force alongside their technical, subject-matter task. The grammar books, for example, still hold up Zayd who struck Amr, and other examples of the kind that cannot breed in a child any human sensitivity.

Love is a trait we must plant in the small child so that it becomes part of his very character, and I do not believe that an example like Zayd who struck Amr and hurt him can lead to anything of the sort... Why, one wonders, should it not be said that Zayd visited Amr, or something of that kind??

Or why should the arithmetic book not be turned to serve an educational purpose too, alongside its subject purpose, so that its examples close with much care and much aiming at the mark — saying, for instance:

Since Ghalib was a kind boy who humored his little sister, his mother rewarded him with three apples; he ate one of them and gave his sister one — how many has he left?

And why does the Arabic reading book insist on vexing the pupil with its strange vocabulary, its preachy matter, and its dry presentation, in a fashion the grown-up can hardly endure — how much less the child? I could wish there prevailed in our books a spirit like the one we feel in the foreign reading books, when they resort to color, to invention, and to the help of sweet, attractive pictures, and when they touch in their stories on human themes of kindly bent — like the story of the princess who loved the prince because he was a hero and a gallant who helped the weak and the poor. The word "love," or "affection," rarely appears in our Arabic curricular books; and if it does appear, it is with the sensation of one who feels he is mentioning before the young something that must not be mentioned, or broaching a subject the want of frankness about which is still a force of hideous repression in our young people.

And after all this, the difficulties of the Arabic book prescribed for the young are still being raised and taking on solid shape; the men and women teachers feel them whenever they put them to the touchstone of the new methods. May all this, then, spur our friend whom we were visiting — who, I know, has in her head a plan for a curricular book on teaching the language to the young — to make haste in carrying out her plan; for woman has been, and remains, the nearer in reach to the child's mind and psychology, and her book will in turn be a spur to others toward a similar attempt, so that the young may find in their hands books that join technique with charm and with the considerations of psychology.