Don't Shock the Child

"Nida' al-Sihha" (The Call of Health) is a magazine, the first of its kind in the Arab East. Two issues of it have appeared, at the rate of one issue every two months. It aims at "awakening the individual's insight by the light of health, and stirring his resolve to walk in that light, so that he may be safe from stumbling and slipping into the mire of bodily, mental, family, and social diseases." (1)

As we welcome the appearance of our colleague "Nida' al-Sihha," appreciating the importance of its mission in health and education, we are pleased to quote this guiding word by its Responsible Director, Mr. Salim Najim, as we make ready for the opening of the schools...

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We all know that the twentieth century has been distinguished by a palpable advance of knowledge in every direction, and the credit for this advance goes to the schools, which trained man in sound thinking and prepared him to be that discoverer and inventor and deviser, that astronomer and philosopher and lawgiver.

Educators have given special care to the raising of the young and to training them in a way that does not conflict with the child's psychology. The philosophers of the science of the mind studied the aims of the little ones and their movements; they probed and tested and observed the aptitudes of the rising generation, and then laid down the laws of discipline which, if the teacher adopts them and the parents understand their import, the nation guarantees itself a happy life, and success is its ally forever.

For the general benefit, the colleges and universities opened special branches to teach teachers the art of teaching, and this lofty idea has brought abundant profit, so that we now see the graduates of the teachers' colleges, men and women alike, attending to the child's growth — full and well proportioned, in mind and thought and sense and intellect and body. The old-fashioned teacher, whip in hand, shouting in a voice of menace, has left no trace in the modern schools. The school that yesterday was an "ogre" frightening the little ones, so that they shrank from going to it, has today become a spring to which they come to draw knowledge without exhaustion or difficulty.

To the modern schools, then, father of children! To those clear springs from which your children draw sound knowledge, in a manner that does not split the head, nor sap the will, nor bear down upon mental and bodily growth together. How many a child looks upon the school as a "bogeyman," for the harshness and roughness he meets there, and turns and flees whenever he is pushed toward it by force. Do not shock the child at the beginning of his life and in his first school, and do not suppose that he gains knowledge through harshness and compulsion. The child has natural inclinations, faculties, and bents, and these are not known to the teachers of the "cracking rod," but to the true, trained educators, who take account of your children's condition and help them to strengthen their natural inclinations, to awaken their noble faculties, and to guide them along the straight way.

(1) From the editor-in-chief's opening editorial in the September–October 1955 issue.
(2) The two children in this picture are Fuad and Nada Mukhtar Shalli.

Learning is no longer, as in the old days, wrapped in magic and mystery, nor is it the preserve of a special class of gifted prodigies at whom the common people gazed with reverence and awe. Whereas fifty years ago the proportion of those who could read and write in the eastern Mediterranean did not exceed 2 percent, today reading and writing have become an ordinary matter. And now that the sciences have branched into numerous divisions and many branches, it has become necessary that reading be an operation whose forelock the child grasps firmly — with his heart and his tongue and his lips together. And since the child must read and write well, and add and subtract and multiply and divide numbers, and gain some acquaintance with the elements of history and geography, it became a duty — and a sacred duty — to secure for him the model school which, though it presents him all these subjects while he is still a small child, can devise for him the most effective methods for understanding them and grasping their meaning, without strain and excessive toil; otherwise the child stumbles and lags behind, and the result is boredom and failure.

There are parents who shock their child by driving him, beyond his capacity, into exhausting study and into memorizing his books by heart like a parrot, in the hope that he will outstrip the neighbor's son. Let that father and his like not load their children with more than they can bear, and let them not move heaven and earth to make the school promote their children a grade when they have failed. Such fathers imagine that they are serving their children, when in reality they are wronging them by laying on their shoulders a weight under which they cannot but stagger. How many a father has been the cause of his son's failure in life through this grievous error.

Here we are on the threshold of a new school year, and thousands of children are coming to the schools... some with hesitant, trembling steps, others with the eagerness of longing... some look at the school as if it were a locked prison, others see in it a paradise on earth... For the attitude of this one and of that there are causes, for which the blame or the praise falls back upon us; and it all goes back to the methods we have used — fathers or teachers as we may be. Beware, then, and again beware, my brother the father and my comrade the teacher, of shocking the child of innocent nature; rather cooperate together to take him by the hand along the road of raising him up strong.