The Woman's Word — Has God Been Lost from Our Schools?

Our children are, beyond dispute, the focus of our concern in life. The greater part of our efforts — I do not say all of them — goes to them. And it seems to me that this concern swells and grows in this month of every year, the season when school activity resumes, together with the public and private concerns that accompany it, all of which come down to taking our children by the hand and enabling them to complete their studies, so as to bring them to the goal we seek.

In this very season there rise to mind anew the many educational problems we suffer as a result of our wavering and instability, and of our failure to rely on a drawn-up plan that would prepare our children for a secure future and a better life. Nor should we forget the objections to our strictness — to the point of rigidity — in applying the baccalaureate program to the letter: we attend to mathematics, the sciences, and languages, while whatever lies outside the program is no business of the school's.

...I say this with in my mind the moral and spiritual dissolution to which our children have come as a result of the school programs' general neglect of religious instruction. However I turn and search, I see no serious efforts to rescue our young people from the abysses of vice and from this disquieting spiritual emptiness in which they flounder — save only that meager effort at home, which by itself is of no avail.

I know that this problem, in Lebanon especially, is thorny and perilous. There is no way to approach it and treat it without hideous "sectarianism" confronting us with a thousand questions. Where, then, is the ideal practical method for equality, for respecting all religious rites, and for imposing no religion upon the children of another sect? There is no denying that herein lies a dilemma bordering on the insoluble, and it is not my intention to call for anything of the sort, certain as I am of the impossibility of applying any solution as it ought to be applied. The whole point is that I, as a mother, feel a bitter pain that God has been lost from most of our schools and, consequently, from our hearts. Our children in the schools become acquainted with every science, letter, and art — except God Almighty! No wonder, then, that they grow up with souls anxious, desolate, and cold, unwarmed by faith and by the spirit of religion — any religion — and by the lofty moral virtues it preaches, which we seek in our children to no avail...

The truth is that what we expend today upon our children is more than double what our fathers expended upon us; and yet it must be admitted here that we fall short, to the point of failure, in carrying out our mission toward them and in preparing them for a life better than our own. For by banishing spiritual teachings from their schools we are leading them astray, even if unintentionally, and weakening in them the immunity against corrupt, devilish currents, so that they are swept along in them without any will of their own, with no guide to guide them and no restrainer to bring them back to the right path.

I cannot decree what ought to be done. All I know is that we, as parents and as educators, must work to save our children and to guide them; and this can only be by bringing them closer to God — the eternal wellspring of all truth and all good. Yes! We need God and His sublime teachings, that by faith and by the embrace of ideals we may be strengthened to face life and to overcome the hardships and woes that beset it.