Chapter 4, Part 1: Views and Positions: Teaching, Free Education and Languages

In this chapter we try to come to know some of Dr. Homad's views in the field of education: his view of the teaching profession, his practical part in making secondary and vocational education free, his opinion on the teaching of Arabic and of foreign languages and on simplifying the rules of grammar, his loyalty to the classical canon of Arabic poetry and his opposition to modern poetry, his deep belief in Arab nationalism and Arab unity, his belief that religion is love and tolerance, and his belief that an Arab's marriage to a foreign woman harms the family, for he was not among those who championed it, as some of his companions married to Frenchwomen did. He also took positions and set out views worthy of esteem in the speech he gave on being received as a full member of the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus. What follows is a look at these views, which show us some of the dimensions of Homad's character.

1. His View of the Teaching Profession

In his address to teachers at the opening of the 1951 school year, he said:[1]

"Know, teachers, that your task is a national mission and a sacred calling, not a job. Once you realize that you are raising the new generation to come, the one that will take its place in public life when time obliges us to leave that place to it, you will understand the dignity, the honor and the importance of your work.

"Heavy responsibilities rest on you, teachers. If you do not carry them in the best possible way, you expose the very existence of your nation to danger. To fulfill your mission completely, you must have a deep understanding of your public duties.

"You must love your profession from the bottom of your hearts, and be sure that it is the noblest of callings and the finest of works. Nor is it enough to love your teaching profession: you must be devoted to it and give yourselves wholly to doing it as well as it can be done. Whoever is devoted to his work pleases his Lord and his conscience and does his duty toward his homeland.

"Always remember that a teacher who believes that the store of learning he carried away with his diploma is enough for his teaching duty is gravely mistaken, because culture, like life, grows and renews itself every day. Whoever closes his book, and does not sit with it for long hours every day, closes the door of life on himself, abandons its lofty meanings, and becomes, in doing his work, like a machine with no life in it. In this lies a danger to lofty values and a denial of the discoveries of human thought, which has no homeland. So a teacher who wants to be a true teacher must stay in constant touch with study and reading and with examining the educational questions that come before him. In this way he raises his own standard and spends his time with pleasure and profit."

While Dr. Homad stresses the instructional side of the teacher's task, he stresses the side of moral upbringing and guidance as well. He says: "The instructional side of your task is no great thing when measured against its more important side, that of upbringing and guidance. A teacher who stuffs his pupils' heads with information all year and then tests them at the end of it does not deserve to be called a teacher. The teacher's true task is one of upbringing and guidance before it is one of instruction."

He then sets out the ways by which a teacher becomes a true educator: "To be a true educator, a teacher must be in close touch with the community in which he teaches, understand the character of each of his pupils, keep notes on each of them, and prepare them well to live in that community. Most important of all, he must make them trust him, and they will trust him only if he trusts and respects himself and makes himself a model, so that he commands his pupils' respect and they shape their characters after his. A teacher's character is very like the mold that shapes soft material and gives it its own form and appearance, and it is a crime against the homeland for that mold to be misshapen and sickly."

He reminds teachers of Shawqi's words, saying: Whenever you reflect on Shawqi's line,

the bright, shining sides of your noble work will be revealed to you.

He calls on teachers to keep away from partisan politics, because they belong to the whole nation, not to one person or one party, and he gives his reason: "Your national duty and your professional honor require you to keep away from everything to do with party politics. For when politics enters the schools, it splits the teachers into factions, destroys the parents' confidence in them, exposes the calm and quiet of the school to grave danger, and turns the pupils into spoils divided among rival creeds. That is a betrayal of the parents' trust and a wrong done to the homeland, which asks nothing of you but that you prepare its sons to be good citizens.

"The ideal education bears fruit only in a calm atmosphere over which the angels of high ideals hover. Make your school a national paradise, not a partisan hell."

2. His Part in Making Secondary and Vocational Education Free

When he was a professor at the Faculty of Law and a member of the Chamber of Deputies in 1949, the chamber elected in the era of independence, he worked to make secondary and vocational education free. Professor Constantine Zurayk, president of the Syrian University, was his best helper and supporter in the effort, but it failed, and his proposal never saw the light of day in the Chamber. That did not last long, however. The following year he became rapporteur of the committee for the constitution, which was adopted on 5 September 1950, and he succeeded in having the constitution state in its twenty-eighth article that "secondary and vocational education shall be free in state schools." A few months later he became Minister of Education, and with that came the precious opportunity to issue a decree putting the article into effect.

He says of this: A cherished wish of Dr. Constantine Zurayk's, and of mine as well, had come true, and a dark cloud had lifted from the nation's sky.

Of his relationship with Dr. Zurayk he says: "I bear witness that my admiration for his gracious character, his great modesty and his refined and far-reaching culture knew no bounds."

Dr. Homad showed his modesty in conduct and in practice. When he was Minister of Education, he would go to Dr. Zurayk's office to sign decisions and decrees, so as to spare him the trouble of coming to his. And he would excuse himself from the meetings of the University Council, of which the law made him the supreme head, so as not to preside over a meeting at which Dr. Zurayk would sit as a mere member, convinced that a conscientious administration such as Dr. Zurayk's let everyone concerned sleep soundly, at peace and with an easy conscience.

3. His Part in Sending Study Missions Abroad

As Minister of Education he worked, together with Dr. Zurayk, to send study missions to long-established universities, in the hope that they would make up the shortage at the university and in secondary education, even if the country had to bear heavy financial burdens. The effort succeeded in the Chamber of Deputies, and the first mission was sent, some two hundred students in various fields.

He said afterward: "I am convinced that the students we sent, on their successful return, filled a great gap in secondary and higher education, and the Syrian University began to shed light over the whole Arab homeland, after it opened its doors to six thousand Arab students: Iraqis, Jordanians, Palestinians and North Africans..."

4. His View on Teaching Arabic and Foreign Languages

Dr. Homad, may God have mercy on him, admired the definition of the Arabic language that Dr. Shukri Faisal gave in his book "Islamic Societies," where Dr. Faisal writes: "Language is nothing but a fabric of ideas and views, adorned and embellished by feelings and emotions. Behind the verbal shell of every word lies one of the truths in which a people believes, or a charge of the emotions to which it is subject. The great creeds, the myths and the ideals all take shape in the words and vocabulary of a language...

"Our language is not these rigid words in which letters are strung together, but these deep sounds in which our feelings, our thoughts and our far-reaching conceptions are gathered. Each of its sounds has a broad scope, a wide reach and a power of its own, and in its echoes and recesses live the intellectual and emotional legacies of all the centuries that came before us." Dr. Homad comments on this definition: "It is a poetic definition that reveals a deep feeling for the greatness of this language and its role in civilization."

Dr. Faisal held that the reality of the Arabic language obliges us to the following:[2]

1. Arabic must be one and the same throughout the Arab homeland

2. It is a question that spans the history of the Arab homeland, past, present and future

3. It must stand up to foreign languages, to fend off their dangers on the one hand, and on the other to interact with them so as to keep pace with them on the road of progress

4. It is the means of bringing together the sons of Arabism, whom the hands of division have scattered

Dr. Faisal does not hesitate to call for opening the windows of our language so as to bring renewal into it. Renewal rests on three foundations:

1. The pliancy of the language. Dr. Homad says: I understand this to mean freeing it from every complication that makes it hard to learn and to derive words from, that is, revising the rules of grammar and morphology in particular.

2. Ease and simplicity of style.

3. Doing away with ornament once and for all.

Dr. Homad comments on this: "I do not want to pass lightly over the third principle, 'the interaction of Arabic with other languages,' because this basic principle requires us to strengthen the teaching of the foreign language in our secondary schools and universities, not so that the student passes the foreign language examination, but so that it becomes a language of serious reference and study, making up for the shortage of works in Arabic in every field of knowledge, from philosophy and law to medicine, science and technology. It is no secret that the Arabic library, throughout the Arab homeland, suffers from an unforgivable shortage of such references. And consulting a work in its original language is better than reading translated books, especially when the translations are poor..."

Endnotes:

[1] "Al-Mu'allim al-Arabi" magazine, no. 2, December 1951.

[2] Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO), "The Islamic Studies Required of Teachers of Arabic," a paper by Dr. Shukri Faisal, Conference on the Preparation of Teachers of Arabic, Riyadh, 1977, p. 226.