As the Schools Open

We are in the year 1955, in its tenth month, and this month has a special meaning for two groups of people: the teachers and the parents...

At the beginning of every October, parents feel the weight of responsibility and its gravity — the darlings of their hearts are about to begin a new stage of the long, arduous road to the shrine of knowledge and learning. What a responsibility this is! Where is the best school in which to deposit the most sacred thing we possess — to decide, in a word, a destiny: our children's success or their failure, their happiness or their misery??

Where is the better home, in which the child has an independent being, where the parents strive to discover his talents, to direct them and nourish them, so that no energies are squandered, and the child is not driven, against his will, down a path not his own, to gratify his parents' pride?

Where are the parents who watch selflessly over their children's good, working with them in the spirit of cooperation with the school, and not in the spirit of their own tyranny and selfishness — as though their children's being a part of them obliged the children to absolute obedience and to going along with their every wish, or else be counted undutiful rebels?!

The twentieth century's view of education has grown, and its conception has changed from what we knew in the era gone by... Tremendous discoveries have been recorded by the masters of education... Yet I fear that Lebanon, and the sister countries behind it, still flounders in error, far from the true understanding of the teachings of this age and its innovations, ignoring the importance of building the child's personality and of securing the school atmosphere that understands the meaning of discipline and of cooperation with the home in discovering the child's capacities and working to develop them...

Until our schools become what they ought to be, parents must be wise in choosing their children's schools.