Articles, Radio Addresses, and Interviews Recorded at the Time in My Own Papers - Part 1: His 1951 Radio Address to Teachers and a Tribute to His Education Reforms

Opening the New School Year

By His Excellency the Minister of Education

Dr. AbdulWahab Homad

Al-Muallim al-Arabi Magazine

December 1951

His Excellency the Minister of Education opened the new school year with a valuable guiding address, broadcast over Syrian Radio on 14/10/1951, which left a profound impression on the hearts of the country's educators, and stirred in them a vigorous new spirit.

We record the text of the address below:

In the name of God, I open the new school year, and in His name I open a new link in the exhausting chain of struggle against ignorance and darkness.

Brother teachers:

Tomorrow, early in the morning, three thousand six hundred male teachers (3,600) and one thousand four hundred female teachers (1,400) will hurry to their posts in public education alone, joined by a hundred and fifty-five thousand (155,000) male pupils and fifty-two thousand (52,000) female pupils, along with some fifteen hundred (1,500) male and female teachers newly appointed this year, or soon to be appointed.

As you can see, your own numbers grow year after year, so that you may take under the wing of your care a growing number of this nation's children, year after year. This blessed movement will continue, God willing, until every Syrian village has its own teacher, one who has given himself over to the education of its own children.

You must understand, first and foremost, that your task is a national one, a sacred calling rather than a mere job, and once you grasp that you are raising the very generation that will one day take the public stage, when time itself calls on us to make way for it, you will understand the true majesty, honor, and importance of your own calling.

Heavy responsibilities rest upon you, teachers, and if you do not rise to meet them in the finest way, you place the whole being of your nation itself at risk. Your nation does not bear these heavy burdens, in salaries, expenses, equipment, and wages, to the point that the figure allotted in this year's new budget nearly reaches forty (40) million out of some hundred and seventy-five (175) million, the entire budget of the Syrian Republic, for any reason other than to see its own children, entrusted to your conscience and your honor, educated, given sound national guidance, and prepared in the best possible way to surpass the generations that came before them, and to become the men of the future in every true sense of that word.

To carry out your calling in the fullest possible measure, you must grasp your own general duties with real depth of understanding.

You must love your profession from the very depths of your hearts, and trust that it is the noblest profession and the most honorable work there is. I myself have practiced it for eighteen years now, and continue to practice it still, and I remain devoted to it and deeply protective of it. Having practiced it at every level, primary, secondary, and higher education, and having come to know it in its various forms, I assure you it is one single profession, with similar burdens and identical responsibilities. Nothing distinguishes its different levels from one another except the readiness of the teacher and the age of the students, yet all of them remain, at heart, nothing more than the honorable profession of teaching.

It is not enough merely to love your teaching profession. You must also remain faithful to it, and give yourselves over entirely to carrying it out in the finest possible way. Whoever remains faithful to his own work pleases both his Lord and his own conscience, and fulfills his duty toward his homeland. Out of our own wish to help any of you whose soul might waver, torn between fulfilling this duty and shirking it, we have tightened oversight and granted inspectors broad new authority, and increased their own numbers, so that their reports may serve as an important reference in determining a teacher's own standing, whether in promotion, transfer, or evaluation.

We have given private education special attention as well, so that it may help ease the burden upon you, and for the clear benefits it offers the country. We have therefore established a directorate for it in the capital, and assigned it inspectors in some of the provinces where private schools are especially numerous, to watch closely over the precise application of the state's own curricula, and to nurture the spread of national spirit, which must remain the very axis around which all education turns.

I would like to note that private schools hold a claim on our own care that obliges us to ease their own task, but they in turn must always remember that our duty to safeguard the rising generation obliges us to be firm with anyone who fails to respect our country's own rights in providing a sound education.

Always remember that any teacher who believes the store of knowledge he carried away upon earning his own certificate is enough, on its own, to fulfill his teaching duty, has made a grave error in his own thinking. Culture, like life itself, is a living, evolving thing, renewed every single day, and whoever closes his own book, and fails to sit with it for long hours each day, closes upon himself the very door of life, abandons its loftiest meanings, and turns, in the performance of his own work, into a lifeless machine. In this lies a real danger to the loftiest values, and a betrayal of the discoveries of human thought, which knows no single homeland of its own. For this reason, any teacher who truly wishes to be a teacher must remain in constant contact with study, reading, and the careful examination of the educational questions that come before him, and in this way raise his own standing while spending his own time in both pleasure and benefit.

But what I have said so far concerns only the instructional side of your task, and it amounts to little when measured against the far more important side of this same task, namely the side of moral formation and guidance. Any teacher who merely stuffs his pupils' minds with information all year long, only to test them on it at the end, does not deserve to be called a teacher at all. The true task of the teacher is, first and foremost, an educational and formative one, before it is ever an instructional one. For a teacher to be a true educator, he must remain closely connected to the environment in which he teaches, and must understand the personality of each and every one of his own pupils, keeping notes on each of them, and preparing them well to live within this environment. Above all else, he must make them trust him, and they will trust him only if he trusts and respects himself, holds himself up as a model worthy of emulation, so as to command his pupils' own respect and shape their own personalities in the likeness of his. A teacher's own personality is very much like the mold that shapes soft, pliable clay, forming it in its own image and likeness, and it is a crime against the homeland itself for this mold to be deformed or unsound. The more you dwell on Shawqi's own line:

"Do you know of any nobler or more exalted man
than one who builds and shapes both souls and minds?"

the more the radiant, luminous sides of your own noble work will reveal themselves to you.

Teachers:

You belong to the whole nation, not to any one person or party. It is the nation that pays your own salaries, and your salaries, as you well know, are drawn from taxes, taken from no single individual and no single party's own budget. Among what fills that treasury, among other things, is the orphan's own money and the widow's own meager remainder.

It is the nation that entrusts you with its own most precious substance, embodied in its own children, so that they may receive learning at your hands, and draw from your own spirit and character the light of a sound upbringing. Let your only work be your pupils, and your only concern your own school, though this does not prevent you from living within your own community, as honorable citizens who understand its own needs and wishes. In your public capacity, though, you must remain servants of the nation alone, and no one else, drawing benefit from it and giving benefit back to it in turn.

For this reason, your national duty and your professional honor alike require that you keep well away from anything connected to party politics, since once politics enters the schools, it splits teachers into rival factions, destroys the trust parents place in them, exposes the school's own calm and stability to grave danger, and turns pupils into spoils divided among competing sects, a betrayal of the trust parents have placed in you by handing you their own children to educate and instruct, and a crime against the homeland itself, which asks of you nothing more than to prepare its own children to become good citizens. A proper education can only bear fruit in a calm atmosphere, one over which the angels of lofty ideals hover freely. So make of your own school a national paradise, not a partisan hell.

In closing this address, I must turn to those who have been newly appointed far from the regions where they had wished to serve. They must understand that this measure is essential for spreading education across every corner of the homeland, especially in certain provinces that have, until this very day, been deprived of capable teachers, and that wherever a teacher works, that place becomes his own homeland and his own land. Let them be assured that their own appointments were made in a spirit of complete integrity and impartiality, guided by nothing but the ranking of their own grades, with no favor or personal connection taken into any account whatsoever, since we cannot demand lofty ideals of you while betraying them ourselves.

I issued a statement a few days ago in which I said I stood ready to hear every legitimate complaint concerning appointments and transfers, and I hope the principles we have followed will remain a lasting constitution for the Ministry of Education, one that does not waver or change merely because the person of the minister has changed.

Teachers:

Tonight you prepare to welcome in a new year, so work to make it a fruitful and good one, and lay, with your own strong hands, a new brick in the edifice of the homeland, a homeland that has resolved to keep marching forward, to keep pace with the world's most vigorous nations, in the ranks of civilization, learning, and social justice. Remember that the country's own constitution has already laid out for you the path you must follow in your own teaching, in the second and third paragraphs of Article 28, which read as follows:

"Second paragraph: Education must aim to raise a generation strong in body and in mind, believing in God, adorned with virtuous character, proud of its own Arab heritage, equipped with knowledge, aware of its own duties and rights, working for the public good, and imbued with a spirit of solidarity and brotherhood among all citizens.

Any teaching that runs counter to the aims set out in this paragraph is forbidden.

Third paragraph: Education must also attend to strengthening personal character and fundamental freedoms."

I ask God to grant you success in serving your own nation as it truly deserves, and to make this a blessed year for you all. Peace be upon you, and God's mercy.

Reforms in Education

By Mr. Talib al-Sabouni

The Ministry of Education had remained mired for some time in a painful state of confusion and turmoil, one it knew no real stability under, to the point that a bitter despair had begun to take hold, one that nearly extinguished all hope of the stability of purpose and steady educational success this eager nation so longed for, until a new era dawned over this ministry, one presided over by its own self-made young minister, Dr. AbdulWahab Homad, a true son of education himself, having been a pupil, a schoolteacher, a secondary instructor, a university professor, and a legislator, a man who combined youthful resolve with the wisdom of elders, a sharp intelligence with a deep well of learning, and useful, progressive, sound traditions.

If we were to step beyond these qualities, already well known to the different circles, social, political, and academic, in society and in clubs, beneath the dome of parliament and from the lecture halls, and instead enumerate the reforming works whose foundation stone he laid, and upon which he has since begun raising his own sound edifice, fairness requires that we recount some of them here, so that the rising generation may know just how much his own capable hand has planted useful seedlings in the fields of education, fields that were made to flourish again after lying barren, adorned again after standing idle, and quenched again after going thirsty. The doors to scholarships abroad were thrown wide open, and waves of students, teachers, instructors, and inspectors passed through them, in groups and individually, preparing themselves to drink deeply from the wellsprings of true knowledge and full culture, and to return to their own country equipped with what would quench the thirst and meet the growing need for specialists, whose own numbers had been dwindling day by day even as scientific institutes expanded, industrial facilities spread, and technical projects multiplied, all advancing hand in hand with the nation's own drive to rise to its proper standing.

He then threw open the doors of the schools to their own seekers, until nearly all, if not indeed every single one, of the boys and girls of school age were gathered within their own walls, a happy outcome he reached only after a long and difficult struggle, waged both in the People's Assembly and in the Council of Ministers, both of which came to embrace the education minister's own aims and noble purposes, until the number of male and female teachers who joined the ranks of primary education reached 1,500, serving 60,000 boys and girls, bringing the total number of primary-school pupils to a quarter of a million. He secured everything this vast host of pupils and teachers needed to equip their own classrooms, in money and in supplies, in the very midst of the crushing crisis the state budget was suffering under, straining as it already was beneath the weight of its own many obligations. This is quite apart from the efforts devoted to secondary education, and the eighty new sections he added to its own staff, equipping them with teachers, laboratories, and resources, efforts that would exhaust the resolve of even the mightiest of men.

Nor should we lose sight of what this vast body of educators needs in the way of guidance, counsel, and direction from professors who have mastered the paths of teaching, grasped its methods and techniques, and succeeded in achieving its own aims over long years of experience. For this reason the education minister turned to expanding the inspection staff, choosing for it men who combined high character and conduct with the fruit of broad experience, and set them loose in their own duties, to guide, direct, and help their fellow teachers and instructors carry out their own task with the ease required, and by successful methods. Great hope rests on their own worthy efforts in this field, just as it rests on the teaching bodies to respond to these aims and work to achieve them. From this shared cooperation will emerge a generation, aware, well versed in its own country's constitutional principles, working to strengthen them, and striving to contribute to raising the standing of our young nation.

Had the education minister taken any other approach in managing the ministry's own affairs, meddling in every fine detail himself, he could never have achieved these great projects, nor accomplished these remarkable works, which have brought such good and blessing upon the Ministry of Education and all who work within it, and such deep benefit upon the country itself, reaching every corner of it from end to end. But he, God preserve him, left matters to those best suited to handle them, and placed each thing in its proper place, and no longer opened any door to personal petitioning. He shut, in the face of every intermediary, every door they tried to open, so as to preserve his own blessed tenure's purity and safety from anything that might taint or harm it, until everyone submitted to what was right and became certain there was no way around his own straight path. And so everyone went their own way reassured, ready to offer shared sacrifice and shared cooperation toward a noble aim and an honorable purpose.

Through this sound approach and wise management, the schools of the four long-neglected provinces, the Euphrates region, the Jazira, Hauran, and Jabal al-Druze, filled at last with specialists in educational affairs, after having long been deprived of their own effort and contribution in building up the generations of these very regions, regions that had remained, right up to our own day, neglected, never receiving their fair share of attention from those who held the reins of decision in one ministry after another. Those ministries had always given their own attention first to the capital, then to the larger provinces, so that we would find five or more graduates of the teacher-training colleges, male or female, in a single mid-sized school in Damascus or Aleppo, while we would find no such number across all four of these neglected provinces combined. As a result, the balance in distributing a fair share of education among the children of one single homeland grew badly skewed, and these four provinces grew so barren of educated youth that they were forced to bring in officials, junior and senior alike, from the sons of other provinces, while their own sons sat idle, jobless, languishing in the shade of trees in the corners of unemployment and idleness.

If this wise policy continues to be followed at the Ministry of Education, and its own blessed steps in this direction do not falter, then we can be certain that a day will soon come when we find a relatively equal spread of education across every corner of the homeland, and on that day, the rising generation will remember that credit for lighting up those corners belongs to the torch the young minister, Dr. AbdulWahab Homad, held so high with his own arm.

Talib al-Sabouni

A Radio Address on Syrian Radio, 1951, on the Concept of Democracy (1)