The Adel National School on Its Silver Jubilee

A Letter from Baghdad

Everyone who has lived in Iraq, or visited it even for a short while, must have heard of the "Adel National School," for over a quarter of a century it has never ceased to graduate, year after year, an outstanding class of boy and girl students. Indeed, this institute is counted not merely among the best schools of Iraq, but as the best of them — we say it in all sincerity, in view of the brilliant results it records in the ministerial examinations every year. Who, then, stands behind this educational renaissance?

It is the school's founder, its proprietor, and the woman at the head of its administration: Mrs. Zahoura Adel — a bundle of vitality and energy, a symbol of ambition and struggle...

Her school in Baghdad celebrated last month its silver jubilee, marking the passage of twenty-five years since its founding, under the patronage of His Excellency Dr. Abd al-Hamid Kadhim, the Minister of Education. The celebration took the form of a vast festival in which the most varied elements, official and civilian, took part; the gardens and halls were packed with throngs of people, and in the ceremonial hall the finest manifestations of taste were on display, glowing with electric lights arranged with splendid engineering art...

The boy and girl students performed several theatrical scenes and folk dances, and a charming display of fashions, and their choirs sang anthems with great mastery. The proceedings of the festival made the loveliest impression upon the guests, who esteem in Mrs. Zahoura Adel, and in her husband and helper Dr. Anis Adel, two champions among the pioneers of culture and instruction in Iraq... For the jubilee three parties were held, not one, because the hall and the garden, for all their spaciousness, could not contain all the invited guests — people of standing, men of letters, and the students' parents.

And as we set down these words with great pride — for this institute is rightly counted a distinguished women's undertaking — we are pleased to review swiftly the stages through which the institute passed until it reached what it is today...

A beautiful dream haunted the head of the ambitious young woman when, in 1932, she received eight pupils into her house: they were the nucleus of the school that now numbers a thousand pupils. Yes, a thousand boys and girls! For the instruction is modern and coeducational.

Mrs. Adel has declared with pride that from the very first year in which her school entered candidates for the ministerial elementary examination, the rate of success was 89 percent — and this, as everyone knows, is a very high figure. But the principal demanded "better," and kept pressing and striving with her teachers and pupils to raise the general level, until success in her school reached 98 percent — we might almost say 100 percent. Hence the fame of the "Adel National School" spread abroad, and students flocked to it

from every part of Iraq with remarkable eagerness...

I have said that the school began in 1932 in Mrs. Adel's house with a body of eight pupils; in the second year she rented a house for the school and the (coeducational) enrollment rose to forty-six. Growth went forward at a steadily quickening pace, and the school met with such brilliant success that Mrs. Adel was encouraged to build a modern school equipped with luxuriant gardens and games of every kind, and a model kindergarten besides the elementary school; this was accomplished in the most complete manner in 1945.

Last year the school presented 83 boys and girls for the ministerial examination, and all of them passed without exception; this year it intends to present 93, and success is expected for all of them as well!

It was a gracious gesture on the part of His Excellency Kadhim al-Solh, our ambassador in Iraq, when he surprised everyone by decorating Mrs. Adel with the Lebanese Order of Education, in appreciation of her distinguished services in the field of upbringing and instruction. And the final stage of the silver-jubilee festival was a turn through a sumptuous buffet, in which was displayed a generosity worthy of Hatim — or rather, of Adel.

Our congratulations to Mrs. Zahoura Adel and to her husband Dr. Anis Adel on the great victory that has crowned their long struggle, and our best wishes to the Adel National School for ever-growing progress and prosperity, in fulfillment of its lofty educational mission.