Who is responsible for the moral decline in our society? And what are the serious ways to avert this danger that faces our youth?

The world: a force and a human being. A force that dwindles as the features of dissolution and weakness take hold, and a human being within whom the lights of the feeling soul and of an integrated idealism interact.

And since morals are a foundation in the appraisal of these values, and the measure by which the soundness of society is judged, the workings of influence have had their way in shaping morals and straightening souls.

Our society, in this stretch of time, is exposed to an active moral upheaval, in which there is corruption and there is devi-ation, as a result of direct and indirect contact with foreign and Eastern currents alike.

And those who interact most with this upheaval, and are most affected by it, are "our children" — our own flesh and blood... Out of our concern to keep matters in their proper place and to preserve these tender saplings from twisting, we addressed this inquiry to a respected company of our women and men educators — perhaps in their answers lies the healing remedy for a disease that has not yet grown grave..

1 — Who is responsible for the moral decline in our society, and what are its causes? 2 — What are the serious ways to avert this danger that faces our youth?

We put these two questions, in our first round, to the two able educators Miss Rose Ghorayeb and Mrs. Widad Cortas.

Your question reminds me of al-Hamadhani's answer to a friend of his, concerning a letter in which the friend complained of the corruption of the age. He replied: "And when was the age ever good?.. Was it in the Jahiliyya, when Labid said:

Gone are those in whose shelter one could live, and I remain among a remnant like the skin of the mangy beast

Or before that, when the angels said: 'Will You place therein one who will work corruption in it and shed blood?' People have not grown corrupt; the pattern has simply held."

And we, hundreds of years after al-Hamadhani and Labid, repeat something like what they said in pessimism over the state of society.

Are the children of the present generation worse in morals than their forebears? It is difficult

to arrive at a decisive answer, because statistics are not avail-able, especially on so delicate a subject as the measurement of morals. What appears to me is that the children of this generation have merits their forebears did not have. Thanks to the freedom granted them, they are bolder and more confident in themselves. And thanks to the spread of learn-ing and the multiplication of its means — newspapers, books, travel, radio stations, laborato-ries, and musical instruments — we find them broader in knowledge and wider in hori-zon, even if they are not deeper in learning, or more patient in study, than those who came before them.

But freedom and learning have faults to set against the merits. Both have an ill effect on whoever misuses them. When I see, at a literary gathering attended by an audience of the educated, young men chewing gum, shoving one another with their hands, and giving free rein to agitation and shouting because they are incapable of keeping order; when I see young men flocking to the bars, forming circles of vulgar dancing and sessions of noisy amusement; and when I see the political parties feeding in them the spirit of hatred, mutual rancor, and place-seek-ing instead of love of order and an understanding of the principles of true patriotism — I do not doubt that the deviant freedom now within their reach is more harmful than the pressure and constraint that were imposed upon the past generation.

As for the second question, I shall answer it